Best File Formats for Printing

What file format should I send my file in?

Back in the days before everyone was running around with a supercomputer in their pocket one went to a printer or a designer with your words, maybe with some drawings, and they made it look good on an art-board.  The art board was sent to a service provider who took pictures of it and sent back negatives.  Those negatives were used to create plates (by using a giant machine that looked equal parts tanning bed, coffin and trash compactor). Those plates were put on press and, through the magic of oil and water, were the basis of your printed material. 

Back then, one color = one bit of artwork/text, one negative, one plate, one run through the press. Two colors, three colors and more, each with their own artwork, negative, plate and run through the press.

Now, you can sit in your neighborhood revolutionary council meeting, design a poster for large format printing and send it to your print shop via messaging, text or even Facetime. You can look up this page, a sort of “print file preparation guide,” too, though your chance to talk in the meting is coming up soon.

You want your revolutionary zeal to come through: colors, images and fonts true to your vision. So how do you assure you communicate this to your printer?  

Or you promised your fiancé a letterpress wedding invitation — and a shetland pony; how do you make at least one of these things happen?

There are two keys to success:

1) Send the digital file in a format that leaves nothing to the imagination.

2) Know enough to do a good job, but not so much that you think you know more than your printer. Well, at least with Betts.  Some national chains and franchises might not be so up on their knowledge or skill set.  We are a union printer, after all. 

Of Screws, Hammers and Fiddley-bits; file formats:

There are hundreds, if not thousands of different file formats since the beginning of digital storage. When a computer writes information to a file it has to retain the information that was put into it. The more sophisticated the information the more sophisticated the means of storing it has to be so it can be retrieved with all of its meaning intact. The format is just a tool, but you should use the right tool for the job. 

Just because I think it’s neat, here’s a little history of the King of Digital formats: PDF.

PDF  (Portable Document Format)

PDF, introduced in the early 90’s was an attempt to create a standard way of expressing information in a document. In the time before PDF there were document preparations systems such as TeX and LaTeX, Postscript (as early as 1982 - though the idea goes back to Xerox PARC with Interprets). Adobe formed as a separate company and continued to develop Postscript, buoyed and bogged down by a deal with Apple. Early digital laser printers had a Postscript interpreter (sort of an app) built in. It’s still true of many higher end printers. Eventually Postscript led to a display version used in NeXT computer (Steve Jobs, again) and later ported to a number of other display systems. 

Computers got increasingly powerful (the early Apple laser printers, by the way, had more processing power than the Apple computers of the day they were attached to).  Postscript, to be clear, is a programming language, and a Postscript file contained instructions to a Postscript interpreter, often a printer. 

PDF shares the same imaging model and is, mostly, directly convertible to Postscript. A PDF document is a static data structure made for efficient access and embeds navigational information suitable for interactive viewing.

TL;DR - It’s All About The X-Files

The PDF, with some rare exceptions, is the best format to send to a printer for a ready-to-go commercial print job.  At Betts we can pull apart most PDFs if we need to make alterations.

It preserves layout, font and image information.  The way it looks when you create it is the way it looks when it gets printed. Well, mostly, but we’ll go over that in “Why Colors Look Different in Print.”  

You can create PDFs in commercial grade layout software, like InDesign. Word has options for PDF and Canva lets you download a file in PDF. You can create PDFs in PowerPoint, it’s an interesting choice, but it can be done.

Sometimes you have some options that will supercharge the outcome: 

1. Use PDF/X-1a^⁠1 or PDF/X-4 ^⁠2
2. Embed all fonts (Which the PDF/X standard requires, anyway).
3. Export at 300 DPI - more DPI will not help, it will actually make the file larger but without useful information. 
4. Some say to use CMYK rather than RGB, but again, we’ll discuss this in “Why Colors Look Different in Print.”

But There’s More 

For large format printing, especially of fine art prints, photos and even scans are preferred for high quality images. The format that is preferred for this situation is the TIFF. TIFF maintains quality and supports CMYK and high resolutions.  This becomes especially important when printing large format images.  Betts can print images 44” wide.  Useful to know when you might have to print a revolutionary banner and hang it where lots of people can see it.

Oh, did I mention that TIFF is a very piggy format?  It uses lots of disk space, and a file of any real size will need to be sent by some method other than an email attachment.  Seriously, they can get huge.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

EPS or vector graphics is really the way to go when it comes to a logo or illustration that will need to be at all sorts of different sized. 

In case you thought we had left our good friend Postscript behind (you read my short history, didn’t you?), EPS files are Encapsulated Postscript.  This makes them a program that contains instructions to draw themselves.  As such, scale is no object.  If the EPS file was designed for use as a logo on a business card, it can be re-scaled to fit a billboard with no loss in fidelity.  An image file like TIFF, by contrast, would pixellate and look terrible at billboard size.

I’m a Designer!

Sometimes an Adobe InDesign or Adobe Illustrator file is the right move. These programs are pretty much the standard in professional graphic design. For commercial printing in Tucson, it’s stock and trade. It might make sense to provide one of these files so long as all the fonts, images and other resources are included. This option really should start with a conversation with our staff.

While we are on the topic, a lot of the behaviors in InDesign are directly from the fully analog workflow, and a lot of the assumptions made about how best to set up an InDesign file come from that world.  By contrast, most if not all younger designers (trained almost exclusively in digital design and printing) have never had to produce in an all analog workflow and so they will use InDesign in a manner that is unusual or idiosyncratic. That’s part of the reason a press-ready PDF is best because it hides all the messy details behind a polished final product.

“My File.pdf”

We have pretty solid naming conventions in-house here at Betts, so we don’t need you to have a clear names like:   Branded_Merchandise_Printing_8.5x11_CMYK_Final.pdf

What we do need are your details for each file you send.  What is the finished size of your file?  How many copies?  Did you design it for bleed (see relevant section)? What is your timeline? What kind of paper?  Hopefully, we’ve already discussed all of this before you send your artwork, but it never hurts to be certain all players are on the same field.  

¹ PDF/X-1a remains the most widely requested standard due to its compatibility with both legacy systems and modern presses. It enforces CMYK-only color (with spot colors) and flattens transparency. All elements in the file, including fonts and images, must be embedded. This makes the file highly predictable throughout the print production process, although transparency flattening may result in heavier files and slight changes in blending appearance.

² PDF/X-4 is specifically designed to work seamlessly with modern digital presses and RIP systems. It maintains transparency, allows for multiple layers, and supports device-independent color with ICC profiles. This results in several advantages:

- Smaller file sizes

- Faster rendering

- Precise preservation of visual effects as intended

While PDF/X-4 has gained significant adoption in recent years, if you’re uncertain about the support for this format by your print provider, PDF/X-1a remains the “safe option.”