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In order for a commercial printer to properly plan a project on a specific sized press sheet, the document page size should always be the exact size of your finished trimmed piece. Extra elements like bleeds, information panels or crop marks can still be used, they just need to be outside the document page.
Avoiding Potential Problems
When project layouts are different than the document page size, the actual project size is not known by any other prepress applications. For example; when a 9”x12” brochure is created on an 11”x17” page the actual brochure size is not known, only the 11”x17” size is known. This can cause a few issues during the production of your project.
Project Planning
When the actual project size is not known, the size applied to a press sheet during planning can be incorrect, causing improper project placement on a press sheet. For example; if your customer service representative prints out a laser proof of your project for their job planner, and they inadvertently output the wrong size (fit to paper), the wrong size project goes to planning. This page size could be incorrectly determined to be ½” too large, and the number of positions your artwork can be repeated on a press sheet will be miscalculated (too few). The job could then end up costing the customer more than necessary because more paper is used for the job than need be. See the example below:
When the page size is improperly calculated, your project plan could be 4-up on a press-sheet...
when it should be 6-up, saving paper cost and time on press.
The opposite is also true, however, the point that I’m trying to make here that the job planner needs to know the proper exact finished size to plan a press sheet accurately.
Cropping and Trimming
During project planning at your favorite printer, a project size is defined for the press sheet. At the prepress stage, the project is created per the job planning specifications. If the actual project size is different than the space allocated for the artwork on the press sheet, the project could be printed incorrectly; appearing to be either trimmed or cropped inaccurately.
The red color to the right and bottom on each page represents image area that will be trimmed off.
Page Centering
Similarly, when a project layout is floating on a larger page, it is difficult to determine if it is exactly centered and could be positioned incorrectly in the allocated press sheet space. This can also cause improper cropping or trimming. For example, if an 8.5” x 11” project layout is on an 11”x17” page, and not centered properly the final trimmed piece will be 8.5x11, but the project could look off center, or have images cropped off on one side, and too much white space on the opposite side.
In this over-exaggerated example of off-centered placement, the blue area demonstrates too much space on the right and bottom.
Manual Crop Marks
When you create your document layout to the same size as your printed piece, you will not need to manually draw crop and trim marks. More times than not, when crop marks are drawn manually, they are usually not as accurate as what your layout program can do. Simply put, there is no need for the extra work.
Avoid Page Ganging
As mentioned in the Number of Pages articles, avoid adding multiple printed pages on the same document page layout. It would be more appropriate to make a single page, or document for every printed piece. Leave all page grouping, ganging, or impositioning to your offset printer.
This is a classic example of what should be avoided - multiple business cards on the same page.
While many of the potential problems listed above sound like “not my problem”, the fact of the matter is that it effects your project, and therefore ultimately becomes your problem. You may not be charged up front for certain issues, and prepress catches many issues before they go to press. But in end, it always effects how quickly a job can be produced, by the number of times your project cycles thru a shop. In the long run it effects the print shops hourly cost of doing business - which is always charged everyone.
The simplest and best solution to avoid all the potential problems described above, or course, is to make the document page size the same as the finished printed piece. That sums it all up!
You may want to check out the Adjusting Panels topic to see anything applies to your project. Or, return to the Page Setup menu for more page setup consideration topics.
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