Tips for Preparing Your Color Microsoft Publisher Publication for Commercial Printing

If you need printing options that you don't have on a desktop printer, you can take your Microsoft Publisher document to a commercial printer that produces work on an offset-printing press or a high-quality digital printer.

Tip 1: Discuss your project with your commercial printer

Talk with your commercial printer before the design process to save yourself time and money later. Before you start your project, describe your project and goals, and find out if your printer has any special requirements. Before you create your publication, discuss the following:

• Ask whether or not the printer accepts Publisher files. If you can't find a commercial printer in your area that does, you should ask about other ways to submit your publication for printing. Most commercial printers accept “PostScript” or “PDF” files, and they can tell you how to create these files from your publication.
•  Inform the printer about your project's printing needs, such as: quantity and quality of copies, paper stock you want to print on, paper size, recommended color model; any binding, folding, and trimming requirements; the overall budget, file size limitations, and any deadlines there are for the whole project.
• You should always check that the printer has the items that you want in stock.
• Let the printer know whether your publication will include scanned pictures, and if so, whether you will scan them yourself, have a service bureau scan them or if the commercial printer needs to do it.
• Ask for any recommendations that can save you money.

Tip 2: Choose your color model early

Before you spend a lot of time designing your publication, decide whether you want to print your publication in color. If you print your publication to a high-quality digital color printer, you don't need to worry about the colors you choose as digital color printers accurately reproduce millions of colors. If you plan to print your publication on an offset printing press, you have several color-model options. Offset printing requires that a professional press operator set up and run the print job. Generally, every ink that is needed to print the publication requires more setup for the operator and increases the cost. The number of inks that you need depends on the color model that you choose. When you set up color printing for your Microsoft Publisher publication, you can choose from these color models: RGB (Red, Green, Blue) – Use this model if you print by using a digital color printer. Single color - Everything in your publication is printed as a tint of a single ink, usually black. This is the least expensive color model to print on an offset press because it only requires one ink. Spot colors – With this model, everything in your publication is printed as a tint of a single ink - usually black - and a tint of one additional color, the spot color, which is usually used to highlight things. This color model requires a minimum of two inks and can increase the cost of printing on an offset press with each ink that you add. Process colors (CMYK, or Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and black or Key) – With this color model, your publication is printed in full color by combining varying proportions of the colored inks. Although you can combine these four inks to get almost a full range of colors, you can't get every color, e.g. CMYK can't produce colors that are highly saturated or metallic colors. Process-color printing requires setting up a press with the four CMYK inks. It requires skill on the part of the press operator to line up the impression of one ink with the others, a process called registration. These requirements make process-color printing more expensive than spot-color printing. Process plus spot colors – This is the most expensive model to print because it combines process-color printing (CMYK inks) with one or more spot-color inks. You use this color model only if you want both full color plus a highly saturated or metallic color that can't be produced by using CMYK.