[sac-board] Re: Printed materials

Peter,

Thanks again for your time & efforts. Also for the education in the Printing
business. Nice to have someone with the level of expertise you have doing
this for us. We'll miss you at the party, hope your event is enjoyable as
well.

Clear Skies
Rick Tejera 
President 
Editor SACnews
Saguaro Astronomy Club
Phoenix, Arizona
saguaroastro@xxxxxxx
www.saguaroastro.org


-----Original Message-----
From: sac-board-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:sac-board-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Peter Argenziano
Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2006 5:34 PM
To: SAC Board
Subject: [sac-board] Printed materials

Regarding the brochure, I got the printing done, but not the folding. The
two shops that I normally use have just too much year-end work for me to ask
for free time on a piece of equipment. We can wait until after the first, or
we can fold them manually. I folded about 10 of them... it's not too
difficult. ;--)> I noticed that the three columns aren't exactly the same
width, but certainly close enough for this project. The variance is within
four points, or so. In future printing, I'd probably omit the fold marks.
When shifting the image they have a tendency to not align precisely on the
fold, thereby appearing in the clear space. If they aren't eliminated I'd at
least make them a light grey color. I did have to shift one panel (on one
side only) to keep the graphics off of the fold. In the master document the
panel with the map and calendar should be shifted (independently of
everything else) about 6 points (~ 2 mm) to the right. Also it wouldn't hurt
to shift the panel with the three photos about 10 points (~ 3.5 mm) to the
right.

I used PitStop Pro to do the shift and noticed (admittedly after they were
printed) that the shift clipped the left edge of the orange-ish box. If I
shifted it back to the right the fold mark was no longer along the fold.
Given the intended purpose of this document I think they are of a quite
acceptable quality. In fact, those who saw them thought they looked very
nice indeed. Good job, Paul.

In the future it would be much easier for me to work with native files as
this PDF didn't behave in PitStop as expected. I tend to use tools that are
standards in the printing and publishing industry, and Adobe PDFs and
PitStop are certainly that. I'm unsure how the tool Paul used built the PDF.
It has been my experience over the years that PDFs built using engines other
than Adobe's Distiller (e.g. Ghostscript, Amyuni, CGI scripts, various
freeware and shareware, etc.) all produce slightly varying results. In this
file almost all segments were flattened (except the photos), where normally
almost all elements are editable. In this PDF all but the photos were tagged
as uneditable. Peculiar. If we do something similar in the future, perhaps I
can work with a PostScript version of the document? That I could bring into
InDesign or Quark (printing and publishing standards) and have more control.


I hope my explanation didn't sound harsh or anything -- it certainly wasn't
meant that way as I believe SAC has a great little brochure!

I will give them to Gene, along with the Marathon waivers, to bring to
Saturday's soiree. Look them over and see if they meet with everyone's
approval. If they do... start folding (or wait until January). If not, I'll
get them re-printed.

Peter

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