Print 101

Question 1

What is cover stock?

Answer 1

Cover stock is a thicker type of paper suited for products that require greater durability, such as business cards, book covers and postcards.

Question 2

What is text stock?

Answer 2

Text stock is lighter and more flexible type of paper with a textured surface that is ideal for products that will have a wide distribution such as flyers, brochures or letterheads. High quality.
Most common weights are 70# or 80#.

Question 3

What is bond?

Answer 3

Bond is usually reserved for letterheads, business forms photocopying and quick printing jobs.
16# for forms
20# for copying
24# for stationary

Question 4

What is coated book?

Answer 4

Coated book is a glossy sheet that yields vivid colors and excellent reproduction for magazines, catalogs, calendars. Greater color fidelity and definition.

Question 5

What is uncoated book?

Answer 5

Uncoated book is the most common sheet used for offset printing. Usually a 50# or 70# stock.

Question 6

What is offset printing?

Answer 6

Offset printing is a technique that transfers ink from a plate to a rubber mat to paper instead of directly from plate to paper. Allows large volumes of printing to be completed quickly and without any variations in ink distribution. Dries quickly. For larger runs, high image quality, specialized colors, larger format.

Question 7

What is pre-flight?

Answer 7

Pre-flighting is the process od confirming that the digital files required for the printing process are all present ,valid, correctly formatted and of the desired type. Automatically done by HubCast.

Question 8

What are the top 10 issues with PDFs in printing?

Answer 8

1. Image resolution too low.
2. Fonts are not embedded in the PDF.
3. The wrong color space is used.
4. Info about trim or bleed is incorrect.
5. Inconsistency with native file, looks different from PDF
6. A spot color is misnamed or accidentally converted to a process color.
7. Images are too compressed, causing quality loss.
8. Page size is incorrect.
9. Problems with transparent objects.
10. ICC profiles are missing or incorrect.

Question 9

What is groundwood paper?

Answer 9

Groundwood paper includes newsprint and other inexpensive paper made from pulp created when wood chips are ground mechanically rather than refined chemically.

Question 10

What is freesheet paper?

Answer 10

Freesheet paper is free of pulp, produced from a mechanical grinding process. Brighter and much more permanent than groundwood stocks.

Question 11

What is a print broker?

Answer 11

A print broker takes a company’s print job and presents it to multiple professional print facilities who in turn will compete in price and turn around time for that job. In the end the company can get a greater quantity of product, a better quality of product and achieve a cheaper price per piece.

Question 12

What is perfect binding?

Answer 12

Perfect binding requires no sewing at all. Instead, a water-resistant adhesive is used to hold the pages in place by attaching them to the cover of the document.

Question 13

What is saddle stitch?

Answer 13

Saddle stitch is bound by stapling sheets together where they fold at the spine. Also called pamphlet stitch, saddle wire and stitch bind.

Question 14

What is imposition?

Answer 14

Imposition is the arrangement of pages for printing so that the finished work will have its pages in the correct order.

Question 15

What is make-ready?

Answer 15

Make-ready is the process of preparing the printing press for a new print job. This can include:
•Cleaning or making adjustments to the press including adjusting the guides.
•Loading the correct inks and colors.
•Setting up the printing plates.
•Getting the right grade, weight, and size of paper loaded.
•Printing a proof or test document to ensure everything is set up properly and the quality is acceptable for the print run.

Question 16

Printer spread vs. reader spread

Answer 16

Both the Reader’s and Printer’s Spreads are tools used to visualize how a digital document will be printed on a press or bound into a book; the practice is known as imposition.
The Printer’s Spread shows the layout of pages, like they would appear on a press so the front and back of each page are lined up and the some of the pages are inverted as necessary so that the final print order will work out right.
The Reader’s Spread just shows the pages as they will appear once everything is bound up into a book format, so pages 2 and 3 will show together, for example (since the left page is always even numbered).

Question 17

What is a parent sheet?

Answer 17

Flyers, business cards, letterhead an so on are not usually printed on sheets of paper of the size we see them every day. Printing firms use bigger sheets of paper that will contain more copies or pages of a certain publication, flyer and so on. These big sheets, called parent sheets, are then folded and cut as needed to give us the printed product in the final size, which is what we see.

Question 18

What is a trade printer?

Answer 18

A Trade Printer is a printing company that provides print materials to resellers at a wholesale rate. As a general rule, these resellers must be in a print-related industry (work within the printing trade or in a similar trade).

Graphic designers, ad agencies, marketing firms, print brokers, copy shops and other printing companies are all potential customers of a trade printer. Purchasing the printing wholesale from a trade printer allows them to resell it to their own customers at a competitive rate.

Question 19

What is spot color?

Answer 19

Spot color is specially mixed ink using in printing. Spot color inks come in a rainbow of colors, including some specialty inks such as metallic and fluorescent. It cannot be made with CMYK. Mostly used with offset printing.

Question 20

What is PMS?

Answer 20

Pantone Matching System