PC Compatibility

First, consult with our pre-press department if we have the same programs and fonts that you are planning to use in your document. All of the major Graphic Arts applications are now available on the PC and are being used here at Marcus Printing. They include InDesign, QuarkXpress, Illustrator, Photoshop and CorelDraw. We also welcome MS Publisher files. We support MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint, however they are not suited very well for image setting. The text will often reflow and they don’t support color separations.

Understand that the fonts you use must also be used, translated or matched, so make a list of their names so that you can submit that too. If your printer is going to translate them for you, then you must go find them in your system directory and put them on a disc also. Also, the graphics you import should be saved in “.eps” format (see below). For bitmaps, “.tif” is the favored format. Tiffs are reliant on resolution ,so you can’t enlarge them too much in your application, or they will look very jagged. Also read the basics on “The Digital Prepress” page; most all of this information pertains to you too. Mac or PC doesn’t matter, we are speaking “Postscript,” the language of printing.

Fonts

TrueType and OpenType fonts are what you are most likely using, and that’s fine. Our systems will accept them. However, the history of the printing business is based on the Postscript language for high resolution printing, and on occasion TrueTypes do not play happy. If you are serious with what you are doing, you may want to consider using Postscript fonts.