Print Separations in Color

Only available if your target printer is capable of printing color, this option prints each plate in its specified color. The value of this feature is for visualization, and it is particularly useful if you print to transparencies. You can create a home-grown color key, wherein you overlay the transparencies to see how the composite image will look. This has limited usefulness compared with the professionally prepared color keys or matchprints provided by service bureaus, but it may help you catch certain glaring problems. If one color doesn’t look right overprinting another, for example, it isn’t likely to look right when printed commercially.

Most of the time, you will be printing separations to a print file or to your laser printer, and this option will be unavailable.

Hexachrome Plates

DRAW can create color separations for the six-color hexachrome printing process as well as for traditional four-color separations. By using six inks instead of four, hexachrome printing is capable of reproducing a wider range of colors. Of course, the additional negatives, plates, and press impressions make it more expensive than traditional four-color printing, and there aren’t too many print shops offering the service; but at least DRAW makes the option available if you need it and can get it. Choosing the Hexachrome Plates option will automatically convert any spot colors in your document to hexachrome colors.

High Solid Ink Density

If you choose to create hexachrome plates, you’ll also have the option of choosing High Solid Ink Density. Consult with your service bureau or print shop to determine whether your job will print better if you use this option.

Convert Spot Colors to CMYK

This feature is specifically for use with the Pantone Matching System of spot colors. Turning this option on tells DRAW that you do not want a separate plate for each spot color in the document. Instead, you want DRAW to approximate these colors with a CMYK equivalent. This can simplify the project and reduce printing costs.

WARNING Be careful with spot color conversions, because accuracy will vary among the Pantone colors. This is not DRAW’s fault; it derives from the nature of Pantone’s colors themselves and how they are different from process inks. For instance, if a certain object can be rendered with a Pantone color printed at 100%, the look will be a very rich, solid color. But a conversion to CMYK inks will probably result in a mixture of the three colors, at various shades, and this will likely introduce a halftone pattern that wouldn’t have been present with the Pantone color and might not be desirable.

Print Empty Plates

Checking this option tells DRAW to print a plate for every color, even if it is empty for a given page, and is a means of minimizing confusion when a job is passed from you to service bureau to printer. This method of tracking can prevent the printer or someone else from erroneously thinking there are missing plates and holding up your job.

Bear in mind, however, that you will be charged for each plate imaged on film at your service bureau, even if there is nothing on that plate. A solution might be to supply a set of laser proofs that include empty plates for reference. Then prepare the film without the empty plates.

Trapping

Trapping itself will be discussed at length in Chapter 27, but let’s take a look at the three auto-trapping functions here in the Separations page. They can help you in lieu of manually created color traps, for many situations.

Preserve Document Overprints If you have deliberately set overprints in a document, you must enable this check box, or DRAW will ignore them. Fortunately, this option is checked by default; otherwise there would be a lot of angry DRAW users, whose carefully overprinted objects did not overprint on film.

Always Overprint Black This option does exactly what it says. It tells DRAW not to create “knockouts” where a black object sits on top of objects of other colors. If you have a lot of black text in paragraph size, this would be a good option to have on. But if your drawing contains many large black headlines or objects, your printer might advise you to keep this off.

Knockouts are the opposite of overprints. They are areas on a color plate that are left empty, in anticipation of a shape on another plate going in that space. Head to Chapter 27 for a more involved explanation of both overprints and knockouts.

Auto-Spreading This option is a method of automatic color trapping. It takes an object that is not to be overprinted (an object under which the color is knocked out, instead) and adds an outline of the same color that does overprint. This technique can work quite well but has limited applications. The object in question must have a uniform fill, no outline of its own, and cannot already be designated for overprinting.

The Maximum value determines the largest spread, in points, for any object. The extent of trap is determined by the darkness of the object. Lighter-colored objects will have a larger spread because they cause less visible shift where colors overlap. And the Text Above value determines the minimum size of text to which auto-spreading is applied. Spreads applied to very small text cause blurring and illegibility.