Prepress

The prepress process includes the preparation of artwork for press, media selection, proofing, quality control checks and the production of printing plates if required.

Variable Data Printing starts with a static piece of artwork and has an element that changes which can be fed from a database, such as a customer's name.

Advanced machines have options for additional spot colors with special inks such as metallic, fluorescent and white.

Immediately before the mainstream introduction of computers to the process, much of the industry was using large format cameras to make emulsion-based (film) copies of text and images.

Vendors of Prepress systems, in addition to the offset printing industry, embraced a subset of the PDF format referred to as PDF/X1-a.

Key functionality automates common steps to reduce errors, reinforce quality standards and speed up production.

Examples include automatically re-folioing pages, digital dummies for soft proofs, live linking with Adobe InDesign and pre-flight checking.