Wirt writes:
> >  Depending on how high a quality you're talking about for production.
> >  4-color (or more) offset printing is quite a complex operation,[...]
>
> Let me disagree with Gavin on this first point. It isn't the
> interest of the printer to make it a complex process -- and
> if you follow standard guidelines, it can truly be quite simple.

Let me agree with Wirt's disagreement in that yes, absolutely, it's your
printer who will be responsible for making all this stuff actually work,
since the customer will only be happy if they get something that looks the
way they want it to, no matter how utterly screwed up their input to the
printer is.  Thus it's in the interest of the printer to suffer through
whatever they have to in order to make your job run acceptably, so you'll
hopefully find them willing to answer just about any questions you might
have in preparing your stuff for them.

But I guarantee you'll make the overworked "pre-press" guy at the printer
really happy if you can give him something that's reasonable to work with,
so it's worth asking how the printer would prefer to get things, since the
person selling you their service probably isn't the one who is going to have
to make what you give them work :-)

> Instead of producing the output in the manner necessary for a single-pass
> color printer, where all of the color information is available in one
> PostScript command (setcmyk), QueryCalc performs the necessary color
> separations and creates four separate b&w output files, simultaneously
> creating the page crop marks, alignment circles, and generates
> the standard color test patterns off to the side of the primary
> printing area.

And how do you handle trapping?  Or do you avoid overprinting colors to
avoid the complexities of knockouts, rich black construction, traps and the
like?

G.