In general, don’t use Word files for professional printing. Microsoft never intended Word to be used for printing applications. Aside from quality issues, Color Word files can’t be separated into spot colors, only printed in 4 color process, which is fine for CMYK printing however spot colours can not be used at all. . If you have to use Word to create a file to send to your professional printer, here are a few things to look out for:

If your project is going to print in one color, set up your Word file in black and white before you start! If you set up a color in Word, it can only be separated into the 4 primary color components: Cyan, yellow, magenta and black. For example, if you set up your word file in a medium blue. Let’s say that the blue’s color components are 80% cyan, 30% magenta, 20% black, what looks OK on word and prints out ok on the home printer will very likely look nothing like the professional result that will come out on the press. This is the problem with creating artwork on word. As many printers, SO Marketing included, will request artwork as a print ready 300dpi PDF file with 2mm bleed and crop marks, Word is often unsuitable for this because without purchasing separate PDF writing software, it cannot be done with Word out of the box. This leads to additional artworking costs to prepare your file for print. In many cases, preparing your word document for print could cost more than having it designed professionally in the first instance.

If you can get over the above issues, convert your Word files to PDF before you send them to SO Marketing. It’ll avoid unexpected formatting changes. We will not know what you expected to see if we get a word document and this can lead to big problems and errors in printing.

If you want the best results for your printing project, use the proper tools for the job. For page layout, the industry standards are Adobe inDesign, Illustrator or Quark Xpress. For vector art, it’s Adobe Illustrator, and for bitmapped files, it’s Adobe Photoshop. Sure, you can use other capable programs, but not all printing companies support them.

SO Marketing will do what we can to help you with your print ready artwork however documents created in word always lead to being time consuming correction jobs and charges are inevitable if they can even be corrected at all.

Before you create your artwork, call us on 01538 750 538 for free advice on the best way of producing what you want to see, it will be cheaper than you think to have us create it for you.

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