Colecandoo!

Intolerant about tolerances

May 12, 2021 Leave a comment

Designing print projects on-screen comes with a false sense of precision. It is easy to assume that whatever is designed on-screen will accurately reproduce – without flaws – into a real-world finished product. This is reinforced by the ability to place objects on precise coordinates and align and distribute with similar precision.

Unfortunately, the practical application of the design from computer to real world product comes with a series of tolerances that are not taken into account in the design software.

Such examples are

Variables in the substrate. Paper stocks can stretch, distort and swell based on humidity, storage conditions, temperature and ink density, just to name some variables.
Creep (aka shingling, pushout or thrust). This is covered in an earlier article, but it is the phenomenon of artwork in a book moving towards the foredges of pages due to the gathering of folded sections.
Registration between inks and Embellishments.
Precision of the paper folding.
What your computer says vs what the output device prepares.

Some tolerances are hardly noticeable and imperceptible without magnification, while other tolerances are large in comparison. This article will examine several print phenomenon and the tolerances associated with each phenomenon.

Tolerances in ink registration

This is an example where tolerances are quite tight, and best shown when printing several colours in one pass, such as full colour process offset printing, digital toner or inkjet printing. Take for example the following headline.

At normal magnification, the inks appear to be in perfect registration. However, when zoomed in, it is possible to see that the registration of the inks is slightly off, demonstrating tolerances in microns.

However, it doesn’t take much to make the tolerances worse, such as:

Using a printing method where misregistration is a larger concern, such as flexography or screen printing;
Printing additional colours on a second pass, meaning the sheets have to dry first and add the variable of paper distortion to trying to register the additional inks to the previously printed inks.

Embellishment registration

From here, tolerances begin to get worse. Take for example a full colour plus one spot colour print that has an additional spot UV clear varnish applied over the lettering.

Note that while the inks are in register, the spot UV is off by half a millimetre to the top right. This is because two separate processes were used – a five colour press to print the inks onto the paper; then the spot UV was applied using a screen printed stencil that was made using an imagesetter that was different to the platesetter that produced the images for the plates.

Another example is how a design translates from screen to embellishment. Take this complicated foil, and notice how the fine detail in the foil is lost.

Fold registration

This is where tolerances can be out by several millimetres. A simple exercise that demonstrates this issue is to take a sheet of paper and fold it in half four times, then look at how the pages line up at the heads and feet of the folded pages. The same issue occurs when taking an imposed sheet and folding it into a signature to combine with other gathered signatures for burst binding.

Take the following example that has a running header in InDesign where the sidebars bleed off of the foredge. Note the difference between the highest point vs the lowest point.

What can be done?

Know that printing and binding are not precise and subject to tolerances like any other manufacturing. What is important to know is where the extreme tolerances lie and how to design with them in mind.
Speak to your printer or finisher and ask to see samples of previous work.

There is also page to page registration that needs to be discussed, but this will be covered in a future Colecandoo article.

Filed under Colours, Embellishments, Post-Press Tagged with bindery, binding, finishing, foil, foiling, InDesign, microns, registration, tolerances

10 years of Colecandoo

April 30, 2021 Leave a comment

To most people, April 30 is another day, but for me, it represents a milestone for the Colecandoo site – 10 years since the site was launched.

Unusual beginnings

While the first post Colecandoo was published on April 30 2011, the idea for the site started its life in the year 2001 while working at Mac and PC Digital as a prepress operator for the busy service bureau. The company’s web page had been amended to include a bulletin board, and one of the topics on the board was Need Help Pre-Press. Feeling somewhat frustrated with the usual errors seen by clients, I posted – under a pseudonym – an article to the board highlighting what not to do when submitting files.

Days later, I was approached by the boss about the post. While I initially denied writing the post, he knew it was me, and made the comment that there was some great information that was presented, though was unimpressed by the tone of the post.

Willing to overlook this, he suggested turning my frustration into clients’ education, and rewrite the post into a series of smaller posts providing practical advice on best practices. I obliged, and when other issues arose that I felt clients should be aware of, I would add them to the posts.

Colecandoo could have been a book

Despite leaving Mac and PC Digital to work for Gillingham Printers, I kept writing notes about issues that I thought others should be aware of, conscious that there was very little literature in the marketplace for prepress advice. As I gained knowledge with my new employer, more information was added to my collection, and I was confident that I could curate the information into a book that I felt had a potential market.

Though one observation remained true – the industry was always changing, and information that could be published in one print-run of the book would quickly be out of date. Quark’s domination gave way to the rise of InDesign and the Creative Suite, Freehand was deprecated, and PDF became the way of submitting artwork for printing.

Given this rate of change, a book was deemed the wrong media to prepare this information… but I wanted to get my advice out there, one way or another.

The plunge

Seeing the success of sites such as indesignsecrets and indiscripts, I felt that the best platform for the information I had was to create a website – not to compete with these sites, but to complement their material with what I felt was finer detail on specific information.

On 30 April 2011, the first posts were published to Colecandoo. Many of the first posts related to the handover of files, such as formats that could be accepted; missing deadlines; and even simple things such as labelling disks and CDs… oh how times have changed.

Then it happened…

In early 2013, interest in the Colecandoo site would turn my world upside-down. I was contacted by InDesignSecrets whether I would be interested in writing an article about Data Merge for InDesign Magazine. Since then I’ve written a few more pieces for the magazine, along with close to 30 articles for InDesignSecrets, and spoken at two conferences in an official capacity (as well as unofficially at CreativeWOW sessions and Ignite sessions).

Since then, I’ve been fortunate enough to provide advice and assistance to dozens of businesses, including international advertising agencies, Ivy League universities, federal government agencies, and several major franchises.

I’ve also been fortunate enough to speak to Adobe Software Engineers directly, and through support of readers of the site, I’ve been able to do this several times – something I didn’t think I’d ever do when starting the site ten years ago.

Passion Project

For those that aren’t aware, maintaining this site is not my full-time job – my full-time job is as a prepress operator for Openbook Howden Print & Design in Adelaide. That said, everything that is published on the Colecandoo site itself or its social media channels such as the Colecandoo Youtube channel – is done by me. From my perspective, I see the articles on this site as my way of giving back to the community.

My sincere thanks

My thanks go out to everyone who has supported the site, whether that is as simple as visiting the site now and again to see what has been written; or liking and subscribing to the Colecandoo Youtube channel; or purchased the Data Merge to Single Records PRO script.

Finally, thank you for a fantastic ten years, and look forward to many more years to come.

Filed under News

Inklude (sic) Mixed Inks into Illustrator

April 26, 2021 Leave a comment

A feature which is strangely absent from Adobe Illustrator (yet present in Adobe InDesign) is mixed inks. This gives the user the ability to make a new swatch based on percentiles of other swatches that can include spot colors, along with process colors.

InDesign’s mixed ink feature also allows groups of mixed ink colors to be made, based on how much of each ink should be in each swatch, and the increments they should differ by.

For pure spot color work, this can create colors that would otherwise require using blend modes such as multiply or darken to create similar colors. However, from a prepress standpoint, mixed inks have several advantages over applying blend modes to objects to achieve the same effect.

Embellishments

For digital devices that can apply inline varnishes, mixed inks make sense. In the following example, the headline requires a varnish

Usual way of doing this would be to create a second layer with an identical headline, but set to a Varnish spot color on another layer, with either a transparency effect such as darken or multiply applied; or overprint turned on from the attributes menu.

That’s fine if the position of the artwork is final, but if the design is in a state of flux, that requires moving the varnish to be in the same position as the type.

A solution is to use InDesign’s mixed ink to create a new mixed ink swatch. In this case, I’ll call it Varnished Headline, and give it 100% of the black and 100% of the varnish spot

This solution also applies to other common embellishments such as embosses, foils, raised varnishes, etc.

White Masks

When preparing label artwork for clear or metallic substrates, white masks have to be prepared so that the color art can appear correctly above the substrate. Take for example this logo to be printed over a silver background.

Again, by using mixed inks, it is possible to make a white mask that doesn’t require another layer, blend mode, and can move with the artwork. In this example, three colors would be created: the white mask; Red and a white mask; and Black and a white mask – the last two being mixed inks.

The art can then be recolored so that the red now uses the red mixed ink; the black now uses the black mixed ink; and the paper now uses the white mask ink.

Notice that the gold cup does not contain a white mask – that is because the gold color – when printed on a silver stock – will appear more like a gold foil.

Double-Hit Prints

On one or two spot colour jobs that have large areas of solid ink coverage, occasionally the same colour will be applied twice on the press as to hide any mechanical ghosting from the printing process.

In the above example, one plate would be for the solid color, and a second – though stippled plate – would be for the undercolor to hide the mechanical ghosting. This color can be set up using InDesign’s mixed inks.

But this is missing from Illustrator!

Despite the mixed ink feature being available in Adobe InDesign, it is notably absent from Adobe Illustrator. This is frustrating as artwork that usually requires the three solutions above is often prepared as Adobe Illustrator artwork, requiring old-school solution of layers and blend modes.

If you feel that this missing feature deserves to be in Adobe Illustrator, make sure to let the Illustrator Uservoice know!

https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657-illustrator-desktop-feature-requests/suggestions/31966252-mixed-ink-swatch-like-indesign

Filed under Embellishments, Handover, Housekeeping, PDFs, Post-Press, Proofing Tagged with Adobe, blend modes, darken, illustrator, InDesign, mixed ink, multiply, Overprint

Shortcut to rotate in fractions

April 6, 2021 Leave a comment

A colleague of mine recently had a task of inserting lineart scans into an InDesign file and then rotating the images so that they were straight on the page.

During this process, he’d asked:

What’s the shortcut for rotating an image by a fraction of a degree?

While I can remember many of the shortcuts used in InDesign, I couldn’t remember a shortcut for this item, and after consulting my InDesignSecrets shortcut poster I realised that there isn’t one. There is a shortcut to increase the angle from 1 degree to 5, but not smaller increments… which I thought was something that people would have asked for by now.

For the task he was doing, he definitely needed one, otherwise the workflow was:

Select the item to rotate;
Go to the rotate tool;
Type the fraction and click OK
Check the result and if further adjustment was required, click back into the rotate tool and type a new fraction and try again until acceptable.

A shortcut would definitely make this easier.

Tomaxxi to the rescue

Luckily, one was easy to find online. Scripter Marijan Tompa (whom some may know by the name Tomaxxi) wrote an article on how to write such a script.

In my colleague’s case, the script only needed to be adjusted by changing the angle from 45 in Marijan’s example to 0.1 like so:

var myTrans = app.transformationMatrices.add({counterclockwiseRotationAngle:0.1});
var myObj = app.selection[0];
myObj.transform(CoordinateSpaces.pasteboardCoordinates, AnchorPoint.CENTER_ANCHOR, myTrans);

The script was saved as rotateAnticlockwise.jsx and added to the scripts. A second copy was made but this time adjusted from counterclockwise to clockwise like so:

var myTrans = app.transformationMatrices.add({counterRotationAngle:0.1});
var myObj = app.selection[0];
myObj.transform(CoordinateSpaces.pasteboardCoordinates, AnchorPoint.CENTER_ANCHOR, myTrans);<code>

This too was saved as rotateClockwise.jsx. and added to the scripts.

From here, my colleague could then go to the scripts palette and run the scripts as required.

Similarly, my colleague could make sure that scripts was checked from the quick apply menu.

And from here, go to quick apply by pressing Command + Return and typing the first few letters of the script. This choice would stay in the quick apply so need only be done once.

But the title of the article was a shortcut, so shortcuts had to be applied. That is easily done though by going to the Edit Menu and selecting Keyboard Shortcuts.

In the next dialog box, choose Scripts from the Product Area, navigate to the appropriate script, then place the cursor in the New Shortcut text field in the bottom right and press the keys to become the new shortcut. If the type beneath says [unassigned] it means it won’t interfere with other shortcuts, so click Assign. Do the same for both scripts, choosing different shortcuts for both.

Done. My colleague now had his shortcuts and could rotate the images without having to keep moving his cursor to the rotate panel and manually key in entries.

Given the scripts now had their own shortcuts, these were also visible in the scripts panel, just in case my colleague forgot what the shortcuts were.

But importantly because shortcuts were assigned, they could also be hot-keyed to his ergonomic mouse. Similarly, the commands could be hot-keyed to other inputs such as those discussed in a previous article.

On that note, I thought a shortcut like this would exist, given the amount of other shortcuts that allow for nudging/moving in smaller units. What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments whether this is a specific use-case, or something to be pursued over at the InDesign suggestions.