GENERAL INFORMATION FOR SUBMITTING ART FILES

Adobe Illustrator:
This is the preferred program for creating artwork and ads. You may include both raster and vector images in a single file. Its handling of paragraph structure has become much more sophisticated, so anything you can do in Quark, you can do here, plus more. The beauty of it is, once you have created the ad how you like it, you can "outline" the fonts. This avoids any need for sending fonts with a job. Note: You should keep a none-outlined version for possible future revisions or typo corrections.

Adobe Photoshop, bitmap and/or scanned images:
We like to have all black and white images 600 dpi or higher. Grayscale is ok at about 300 dpi. We use Photoshop extensively and we generally do not encounter a problem with raster artwork.

Quark Files:
In Quark there is a command "collect for output"-run it. This will give you the names of all the fonts, art and extensions used. It is imperative that you send the fonts and artwork. (Some files created with 3rd party extensions may disable the Quark file, but we rarely see this happen. You may need to send extensions. But we would really rather not deal with anything created with 3rd party extensions). You MUST send the artwork with it. Quark only embeds a 72 dpi placement image, not the real thing. Quark also allows you to save a page as an .eps. This is convenient if you want to import your Quark document into Illustrator. It will include the artwork as far as I know. Then you can outline the fonts in Illustrator, clean it up a bit and have a piece ready for press.

Microsoft Word:
The biggest problem we see with MSWord documents is with fonts. Unless you're in the publishing field a PC uses TrueType fonts rather than Type 1. We cannot use TrueType fonts. What we do in this case, in general, if it is a well-known font, we swap fonts, (Times for Times New Roman, or Helvetica for Arial). But if the author uses a font called Chantilly we cannot replace it and generally have to scan his/her hardcopy rather than use the file. Also authors sometimes will import images that were scanned. This wastes their time and mine. Leaving the file as a scan is preferable. We would prefer to have file.jpg, file.tif, file.eps, and file.bmp rather than file.doc. One side effect of including artwork in with the file is that the author may unproportionally stretch the artwork.

Adobe Acrobat PDFs:
Creating the PDF properly is the key. The way to do that is setting up specialized job options. In Distiller go to "Settings" and then "Job Options" in General: Compatible with 3.0, Resolution 2400. In "Compression" have NOTHING checked. Here is where a lot of good 600 dpi artwork gets reduced to 72 dpi by mistake. In "Fonts"-Embed All Fonts should be checked.
     1. Embed the complete font.
     2. Set the resolution to no lower than 1200 dpi.
     3. Do NOT down sample artwork.

Electronic files and hardcopy:
The electronic file should match the hardcopy. Often they conflict, we do not know which they want, so we'll scan the hardcopy in this case. Electronic files should be clearly labeled-for example, fig1.tif or f2.eps or even 3.tif rather than say, round.tif, lever.eps or polar.tif. If they wish they can combine names such as f1round.tif.

4/8/02