Viewing Overprints in Acrobat
Acrobat Reader and the full version of Acrobat view pdfs very differently! If you only have Acrobats’ free reader version then you won’t be viewing documents correctly for ‘print’. We use a full version of Acrobat plus Enfocus Pitstop for editing pdfs. This allows us to changea vast array of elements within a supplied pdf. However if the original document is set up incorrectly there may be elements that just wont work when it is submitted to print. The most common by far is white type on a coloured background which is setup to overprint, if you overprint white over a colour it will disappear when printed! not what you want to see on your final print job.

We would always recommend having a paperproof - this would show up the problems. The process for making proofs is the same for platemaking, however, most customers don’t require paper proofs and have a pdf emailed to them as there ’soft proof’, this is where the problems start. If you use Acrobat Reader then you can only view the document with overprint off (there is no option to enable this) - this shows the document as you probably expect to see it with everything in place, now view the same document with a full version of Acrobat Professional, and make sure the overprint setting is on, suddenly all the overprints disappear, and this is exactly how it would be reproduced to print.
We always make sure we check documents but sometimes they slip through the net. If you don’t havetime for proofs then at least provide us with up to date laser run outs, at least then we can check the contents of the pdfs against them. For the most part try not to adjust trap settings in an application, all ofthe print packages ie. Quark, Indesign, Illustrator and so on have the correct default set up for trapping, if you should need to change it then you must at least understand the basics of trapping. Most printers prefer to add the trap themselves and this is done by the pre rip software, these settings have taken time to get right, so If you want to achieve a special effect with trapping get some advice first - otherwise you are heading for trouble!

   Preferential Treament
Your Mac performs a few house- keeping routines early every morning around 2am which keeps the system running sweetly however if you close down your Mac everynight you might be heading for a few problems, there are a few applications that can perform the same routines as your Mac would normally do. Preferential Treatment can do all that the mac does with a few more bells and whistles as well, it also freeware. you can download it here, but you will need to install the bsd subsystem on your mac if you haven’t already (its on your original OSX install disks).

 Keep your permissions up to date is critical
Having trouble copying or saving files? it could be that your permissions are up the creek!, it should be something we all do at least once a week, but we always put it off and onething leads to another and its forgotten, that is until we start to have problems.There is a remedy and it is very simple, just open up the Disk Utility which you will find in the Applications/Utilities Click your hard drive and hit repair permissions, it will probably find loads of files and directories that it will attempt to repair, once it has finished start it over again until it finds nothing to repair and your done.

Bouncing Application Icons
Have you recently installed or updated a new application? if so you may suffer from theoldbouncing icon in the dock syndrome. This can be very frustrating but is also fairly simply solvedproviding you dont mind a trip into the terminal world.First of all open your Applications/Utilities folder in there you will find the application called’ Terminal’ open terminal and you should be presented with some similar lines of text 

Last login: Thu May 17 09:10:38 ttys000 on ttyp1
petes:~ petelaw$ after the symbol type
’sudo_update_prebinding’ press enterYou will have to wait a minute or so but you will get the promt back as below once again 
petes:~ petelaw$ just type ‘exit’ press enter and close the terminal application, then try your application again, they should work fine now, but you might need to restart you mac to finish the process.

Quark 7 Export to PDF issues in 7.1/7.2 resolved in Quark 7.3
The Gemini studio have been aware of bugs in Quark 7 for some time now, but we have had to find work arounds for them, as quickly as possible. But it just goes to show that you have to have eyes in the back of your head these days with all new software - one such instance is a fairly common every day occurence of Exporting to PDF from Quark 7, and this does seem only to be a Quark 7 issue, it would appear! If any image placed in Quark (7.1-7.2 resolved in 7.3) is made to appear at say 17% then exported to pdf using the standard high res pdf settings with picture commpression at ‘Zip/Jpeg High’ the resulting picture is high res, but, if you zoom in closely in Acrobat you will find that there is a repixalization going on around the darker areas of the image, this seems to give the impression of it being low resolution.

Quark 7.3 update seems to generally resolve this issue, however we have had the same problem with some files, if you have any doubts just take the commpresson off buy setting the compression to none.

As with all updates they have to be taken at face value, Quark have resolved a few bugs with the 7.3 update, but have introduced a few more annoying bugs; the most annoying of which is when you come to export a pdf to your desktop, it looks like its completed it and then tells you ‘you don’t have permission’ to save a pdf to your desktop folder! working around this just means saving it to a folder on you desktop which seems to work fine, frustrating, but not the end of the world!

“I thought I’d contact you to thank you and the whole team there for the continuous high quality service you provide to us.

As a design company & print management company, we pass many projects through Gemini Press. and it is important to realise that we are only as successful as the work our clients give to us.
The fact that all our clients keep coming back with more and more work tells me that they are more than happy with what we are supplying to them.

We seem to be getting more and more messages of thanks from our clients these days. This only makes our relationship with them stronger and more profitable.

I am sure you remember the early, one-man band days of Design Inc, when we first asked for your support. This month, we celebrate 10 years of business and it would not be fair of us if we didn’t acknowledge where the credit lies…and that’s your team, without which we would not be the success we are now.

I look forward to many more years of working with you.” Frank Norman, Commercial Director , Design Incorporated (UK) Ltd