Fonts and Fills

There is really only one thing to say with regard to typefaces: try not to use too many at once. This is important from a printing efficiency standpoint, but is also simply good design policy. As mentioned in the “Font Handling” section earlier in this chapter, if you must include a lot of fonts, with small bits of text set in each font, you should probably let DRAW convert the text to curves at print time, instead of downloading the fonts.

From the same perspective, don’t get carried away with special fills. Effective art makes judicious use of these—use too many and they lose their impact. Specialized fills also can affect print efficiency. They take longer to print than objects filled with uniform color, and some are worse than others.

Fountain fills print fairly fast. The only caution here is regarding quality. Are you seeing a lot of banding in the result? See “Smart Control of Fountain Steps” earlier in the chapter about handling fountain fill steps.

The various pattern fills are quite another story. Whether they print quickly or bog the printer down depends on various parameters. We printed a solid-filled pentagon, created with the Polygon tool, to a PostScript laser printer in a few seconds. Then we filled it with a simple two-color pattern set to a large tile size, and it took just a wee bit longer to print. Next, we changed the tile size to small. Whoa! Print time shot up to almost two minutes.

Other Tips for Printing

Bitmaps usually print trouble-free on most non-PostScript devices. Laser printers do have finite memory in which to image your work, so the foregoing advice to optimize the pixel size of bitmaps holds here, as well. If you find printing is frequently very slow or you often get messages such as “Print Overrun” or “Mem Overflow,” you might need to invest in additional printer memory.

On some non-PostScript printers, notably laser printers that use or emulate HP’s PCL language, fonts and vector objects can be handled in one of two ways. The printer can treat these objects as vectors and do its own rasterizing, or you can tell the computer to send a rasterized image to the printer. Using vectors is faster but can cause problems. If you get errors, try switching this option for your printer (look in the Properties Ø Graphics options).

For those who encounter trouble even after taking all of the above measures, Corel’s developers have included options for overcoming operating system, printer, and driver problems. Open the Print dialog and click on the Print Preview button. From the View menu in the full Print Preview window, select Printing Preferences. This dialog is divided into three sections and contains a plethora of options for both PostScript and non-PostScript devices that you can enable (or disable) so that your prints are trouble-free. Look in the Help files under Fine Tuning a Print Job for explanations for these options.

Tricks with Color Substitutions

Always keep in mind that separations are produced in black and white. The colors that actually get printed are determined solely by what color inks are used at print time. Armed with this knowledge and a little creative thinking, you can sometimes work around a few sticky situations, especially when working with spot colors.

We’ve often found it beneficial to use process-color substitutes for preparing Pantone spot-color print pieces. Say you’re going for a final result printed in a specific Pantone orange and pale green. Instead of designing with these two colors in DRAW, use process black and process magenta to represent them. It’s harder to visualize the finished artwork this way, but it opens a few doors.

For example, you’re confronted with a project for which only black-and-white or grayscale artwork is available, but you want to print it in a Pantone color. Rather than attempting to recolor it, you simply let the black plate represent the actual printed Pantone color. If the job requires its own separate black plate for text or other elements, you could create these in process magenta. This juggling of plate definitions won’t harm your final product as long as your printer knows which ink to use with which plate.

Duotones offer another opportunity for color substitution. Duotones are black-and-white photographs enhanced by application of a single tint. If you’re importing a photograph into a two-color layout and want to create a duotone out of it, the obvious choice would be to apply a Tinted Grayscale lens in one of the two spot colors. Though Pantone colors can be selected for this lens effect, they’re converted to CMYK at print time. Substitute a process primary color as the lens color and for all other instances of that Pantone color, and your problem is solved.

We started this chapter by saying that printing can be a simple affair. So how come we just killed a tree? An old proverb speaks about how the first 90 percent of any acievment is easy and the last 10 percent is difficult, and that seems apt here. Ninety percent of the time, printing will be easy; you really will be able to click Print and go. Ten percent of the time, you’ll have to think about it, and tweak, fiddle, adjust, and hopefully not swear too much.

We like to think that this book is a good read, and we take it as very high praise when readers tell us that they read it page by page. But we have no illusions about how this chapter should be used. It’s a reference; it’s not a good read. Come back to these pages when you encounter a challenge or a problem; return here for a refresher on creating good film; use this chapter to create killer print styles.

The new proverb says that if you can’t print, it’s just a video game.