Metro Mailing & Printing

PDF has gained momentum over the past few years as the file of choice for reliable transfer of fonts and layout. Office software such as Word and Publisher are notorious for being unreliable when going from one computer to another. Word will actually change fonts without warning when it encounters a missing font. Publisher tends to adopt the kerning, compression and font substitution values of the new computer, which may alter the layout without warning (cut-off/hidden type is a common Publisher issue when paragraphs break at the wrong spot and the article ends abruptly in mid-sentence).

PDFs tend to be the safest choice for sending basic black ink jobs to a colleague, customer–or the printer. If you create color jobs for full-color digital presses or copiers, PDFs still tend to be your best bet. The problem arises when you have large print run projects that have to be run on presses in “spot” colors to be cost-efficient. By default, Word and Publisher don’t handle spot colors well and PDFs created from these programs give erratic results when you try to separate spot colors.

If you are planning a project that makes use of a spot color (e.g., uses black and a blue ink) please contact us to discuss options which will make spot color printing reliable and cost-effective.

If you don’t have a PDF writing program, you can download cutePDF for free. This and other free programs don’t have quite the reliability of the true Adobe product, so be sure to compare the results to your original file.

Metro

If you are sending us native Publisher files, please use the Publisher “Pack and Go” command to assemble the fonts and graphics into a folder and use a compression utility such as Winzip to compress all files into a single file. You can then upload this file to our FTP terminal. Please visit the Send Files portion of our website for details.