King Tut Printing: Canoga Park and the Valley's Leading Printer and Reprographics Center

Welcome to King Tut Printing

Support

• File Types
• Color Tips
• Fonts
• Resolution Requirements

Support: Help with File Types

Want your job back quicker? Want to save money?

King Tut Printing can help guide you through the process of sending in your job for printing. Prior to sending your job, give one of our customer service experts a call, or send us an email info@kingtutprinting.com, We'll make sure you have all the fonts and files you need. There are a few basics that are useful to know:

1. What are the best file formats to use for printing?

For printing ink on paper, you really should never use any other file format besides TIFF, EPS or High Quality PDF.

2. What file formats should I never use?

Specifically, the following are not recommended printing file formats: Windows MetaFiles (WMF), Macintosh PICT files, Windows BMP files, and any native application formats (Photoshop, CorelDraw, CorelPaint, Illustrator, Freehand, etc.)

3. How do I make a PDF? (printable instructions)?

4. How do I transform native files into plot ready docs?

From your desktop or CAD application, select a plot dialog (driver). For black & white or color plotting, we recommend the Hewlett Packard 755 plot driver (download). Mac users either make a pdf. or if you do not have Adobe Acrobat or distiller, save your document as a postscript file using the HP DesignJet Postscript Plot Driver.

Color Tips

How do color matching systems, such as Pantone or Trumatch, help a printer specify spot color inks?

The color you select from the PMS swatch books tells us what color to print. A printer finds the exact mixing specifications for your chosen color beneath each swatch of color on the chart. Within printing, lighting, and human eye tolerances, the PMS color you specified from your swatch book should look the same as the one we print for you.

To prevent selection of the 'wrong' color, make sure to select your color from a new swatchbook. Swatchbooks fade with time and use, and should be replaced yearly.

Pantone's process color matching system has recently been improved to order colors by the amount of black in each process color build. This is somewhat similar to the Trumatch process color matching system which divides the spectrum into 50 hue families with 40 tints and shades of each hue, plus 4-color grays.

Fonts

Be sure to send your font files with your document files, or convert all fonts to outlines, this will minimize rejustification problems during output.

Supply all fonts used in your document, or save your text as an outline.
Some newer page layout software tools have a function to prepare you files for sending to a printer. These functions gather all the parts used in your document and save them an an output file. (in quarkxpress and freehand, this function is called 'collect for output, in coreldraw this function is called 'prepare for service bureau')

We highly recommend using Postscript fonts instead of TrueType fonts. Truetype fonts are not as reliable during the output process. If you are supplying Postscript fonts, then remember to copy both the screen and printer fonts.

Linked Images
All images must be in CMYK, grayscale, or bitmap color modes. Images must be saved in either TIFF or EPS (do not use JPEG). Be sure to update your links in the layout file whenever you alter any images after you place them.

Resolution

Any raster image needs to be 200dpi at full size to print properly. Any higher resolution will increase file size as well as RIP (Raster Image Processing) time.

When you think about resolution requirements, it may help to remember the difference between Raster images and Vector images.

* Raster images are pixelated for continuous tone.

* Vector images are not pixelated at any depth and produce crisp, clean lines for type setting and other finite projects.