FAQ's

Trim marks show as short lines at the corners of each page, this determines where our guillotines cut the edges of your work. Guillotines are notoriously inaccurate and can in some cases cut outside of the trim area, so it’s important that your pictures fall outside of the trim marks so that you don’t get left with a white edge. We would always recommend extending your coloured areas that go upto the edge of the page to extend 3mm over the trim area, this way you will be assured that you don’t get white edges.

You should create your spot colours within the “Swatches Palette” and make sure that the colour type is ‘Spot’ not CMYK, then use the colour modes PANTONE+ Coated or PANTONE+ Uncoated to select your desired colour. If you are using Indesign, see the sample below for help.

When exporting and creating your PDF your chosen Pantone should be listed in the output reference, and please check all the elements are correctly in your selected colour before sending us your PDF to print.

When you make a PDF the settings that you use are important for the output. Without all the necessary parts correctly formed in the PDF, it makes it impossible to print.

A font when loaded on your computer has all the glyphs that make up the whole typeface and all of the component signs and symbols, however when you make a PDF you have the option to embed fonts as a ‘Subset’, which means that it will only embed the characters used in the document. If you choose to embed the whole font set, it will make the PDF bigger but will include all characters even if they are not used.

View PDF guide

Trapping is a system that knocks out or adds a border around certain areas so as not to produce a white halo when colours overlap each other. As an example if you had a cyan background and you put a circle of yellow over the top of it, then the result would be a green circle –  if you chose to overprint the yellow, not what you intended, so our system detects that the yellow circle should stay yellow and knocks a hole in the cyan layer, so in effect the yellow would print on white paper giving you the result you wanted.

By knocking a hole in colours means that there is a chance that if the print is not exactly in registration that you might end up with a white halo where the yellow and Cyan didn’t meet properly, so this is where trapping comes in. We add a border of yellow around the edge of the circle and over print just the border, this is such a small amount usually 0.15th inch but it’s enough that you don’t see the white halo.