[Tex/LaTex] good practice when preparing a book for printing

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I'm writing my thesis using Latex and nearing its completion I'm beginning to worry about the quality of the hardcopy. I'm curious about what should be taken into consideration when preparing a document so that the printed document is of such a good quality as the PDF produced by Latex.

From what I've read in some answers on this site, I have the following impressions:

I should ask the printing shop for the binding correction for my page size and take it into account in my page layout.
I should ask the printing shop for their available printing sizes and produce cropping marks if necessary.
The colors in my document should be defined using CMYK instead of RGB (though I'm not certain on this), which makes me wonder if I should convert my current colors from RGB to CMYK.

Are there any canonical things that are important when preparing a hardcopy? Of course I refer to things that can be done in the Latex source to improve the quality of the printed ouput (or to minimize the problems that may arise).

Best Answer

In most cases, you don't need to take care of binding correction, printer marks or imposition. If the printer need that, they usually ask. About the pdf files: A good way of taking care of the issues that affect pdfs directly, in the printing industry, is using the PDF/X1-a standard. You would also need all your images to use the CMYK color model, at least. If you have a lot of images and care a lot about color, you should care about color profiling. I can recommend you to read this discussion, and this one -- basically, you would need to load a color profile file that depends on the machine your printer uses, however, you can get generic good results using FOGRA39 if you are in europe or asia, or any Coated SWOP profile if you are anywhere in the Americas). Ask you print provider if they have any color profile preferences; most used icc profiles can be found here. Also, if you are printing not in offset CMYK plates, but in digital color printing (RISO, Laser, etc.), other considerations may apply. The best you can do, in any case, is ask your printer directly first.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to set a binding offset for multiple pages printed on one sheet

I feel a little uneasy at answering my own question. But lockstep's clue directed me to the twocolumn parameter on the documentclass.

That seems to work fairly. It subdivides the physical sheet into two logical pages. So looks a little like using multicols{2} on the whole document, but with fewer of the drawbacks.

The magic inteplay between documentclass and geometry seems to be (note the exaggerated 5cm inner margin for binding offset -- just to make it easier to see):

\documentclass[a4paper,twocolumn,landscape,10pt]{book}
\usepackage[top=2cm, bottom=2cm, inner=5cm, outer=1cm]{geometry}

This solution may be just the ticket for many documents.

However, I can see problems where I have a wrapfigure inside a miniboxpage with each scaled as a fraction of the \textwidth. It seems \textwidth is sometimes taken as the full physical width of the sheet, and sometimes as the text width of the logical page. I need to isolate cases and investigate further.

Thanks for the responses -- they've given me some hope for the future.

[Tex/LaTex] Fonts too thin when A4 scaled down to A5 in printing

You can use a different font, e.g.

\usepackage[sc]{mathpazo}

\usepackage{pxfonts}

However, much better would be to use a5paper paper format if you're going to print your document on A5 paper. To change various dimensions on the paper (margins etc.), use e.g. the package geometry.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to set a binding offset for multiple pages printed on one sheet

[Tex/LaTex] Fonts too thin when A4 scaled down to A5 in printing

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