HOME
· NEWSLETTER · DEMYSTIFYING DESKTOP PRINTING
Our goal in this article is to help demystify the hidden complexities of desktop printing. We will help you choose the right software, the right printer, the right stock, the right printer settings, and even the right way to feed the paper into the printer. We’ll help you learn how to determine if any problems you encounter are software problems, paper problems or printer problems, so you know who to call for help. Of course, our hope is that after you read this you will be the one providing help when your co-workers, friends and family have difficulty.
Mountaincow is a software company. We want you to choose our PrintingPress invitation software. But for the purpose of this article we will advise you about what to look for in printing software and why. First, you need to be able to easily set a paper size. In Illustrator this is the art board, in Word this is the document size, in Photoshop this is the image size, and in PrintingPress this is the stationery size. For a standard flat card this is relatively easy in all of these programs, but PrintingPress is the only one that knows how to set up a card to have a fold or multiple per sheet, to be an envelope, label or place card, to have an address, or even to have an AccuCut die line.
Next you need to be able to print the art board, document, image or card onto the cut stock you purchased. This is where things start to fall apart unless you are a trained graphic artist, because again, printing stationery is deceptively complex. Many programs assume you want to print everything onto 8.5x11” sheets of plain paper and automatically scale the output to the size of the printer paper. These programs also do not typically know that some printers feed small stocks in the center of the input tray and others feed on the right, or that some rotate left for landscape and others rotate to the right. Only PrintingPress gives you control over these settings, and even lets you adjust the position of the printout with Printer Offset settings to account for that little bit that the printer is off that is totally messing up your thin border card.
(click to enlarge)
Mountaincow has partnered with two printer companies, Epson and OKI. However we formed these partnerships after the printers passed our tests for thick paper handling, small stock printing, and high quality output on matte, textured and metallic stocks. We do not sell any printers and we do not have any stake in which printer you purchase, except that if you have fewer problems with a printer then you are less likely to submit requests to our technical support team for assistance. Our strategy is to find the best printers for desktop printing and then work with the printer companies to get you the best discounted pricing, the best customer service, and readily available toner and ink supplies.
At the 2011 National Stationery Show in New York, we hosted the debut of the new Epson R2000 color ink jet printer in the Mountaincow booth. This succeeds the R1900 which has been the workhorse for many of us these past 3 years. The best things about this printer have nothing to do with its wide format – it is very reliable, lasts much longer than its bargain counterparts at Best Buy, offers consistent color from printer to printer, uses water resistant pigment ink that prevents smudging, produces brilliant borderless photo-quality invitation prints, handles heavy stock, prints on most metallic stocks, and prints on very small stocks as well.
One of the coolest improvements over the R1900 is that the R2000 will let you specify the borderless print at any height in predefined widths, meaning you can do borderless place cards, menu cards and A2 folded notes (with a trick we will discuss later). The metallic print quality is very cool too, and the wireless network connection means you don’t need to plug it into your laptop and you can place it where convenient in your carefully organized workspace. If you only have the budget for one printer, this is the one to buy.
Part of choosing a printer completely depends on the type of stock you are using. When working with thick Crane 100% cotton papers and letterpress cards, you need a printer that can saturate the cotton surface without bleeding. Laser printers tend to flake off textured stocks unless you crank up the heat so much on the fuser that it melts the delicate surface of the beautiful cotton stocks you want to preserve.
On the other hand, laser printers offer much faster throughput, especially for envelope printing, and tend to have better coverage and color saturation on a wide range of metallic stocks and vellum. These are, of course, generalizations, but in our experience hardly any ink jet printers out there can even manage to get ink to stick at all on a metallic stock. The rolling paper loader and straight paper path with rear output door minimize the curl you can get from the heat a laser printer uses to fuse the toner onto the card. The OKI C610 produces a very nice, heavy, almost glossy print, and it modifies its fuser temperature based on the paper thickness and type for the best quality output.
The single most common printer problem is when the printer paper size is not set properly. All printers require the paper size be set to at least the size you are printing or else they will cut off (crop) the print job. This can sometimes appear like the print is not centered, when in fact it is cropped, particularly at the edges when a design goes closer to the edge than a printer can print without a borderless setting.
The Epson and Canon, thankfully, allows you to leave the paper size set to letter (8.5x11”) for all smaller cards, except when using the borderless feature. The OKI and Xerox laser, all HP and Kodak ink jet, and many other printers perform a size check and will reject a job and give you the dreaded “paper mismatch” error. Each of these printers is different, but the general idea is you need to click Properties in the Print window and create and save a custom paper size, and then choose it to use in your print. Then you have to remember to change it back the next time you print a full letter sheet, or it will cut off your print job again.
(click to enlarge)
Saving settings in the printer driver is a great time saver, but in order to be sure they are saved permanently you may need to set them in the Devices and Printers control panel rather than by clicking on the Properties button in the Print window. Don’t be afraid of using the Advanced button because anyone trying to print a 4-bar envelope using a desktop printer is officially Advanced. Our website support center has screen shots and details about many of the printer settings you will need.
Always use the Print Preview feature to make sure everything looks right, and then always do a test print onto plain paper cut to size first. In PrintingPress, the preview shows the current printer settings. Even we experts sometimes forget to choose Landscape when we need to, or forget to set the right borderless paper size, and you never want to ruin a piece of expensive stationery.
If you have ever had a card print perfectly onto plain paper but then print too low when printed onto the same size cut card stock, then you know that sometimes the printer will not feed heavy stock without some assistance from you. How do you assist the printer? By telling it you are printing onto heavy stock in the Paper Type setting in the Printer Properties. Most people never change this setting but it can really be your friend because this is where the printer geniuses spend countless hours fine tuning the printer’s various settings to give the best quality output on different types of stocks like envelopes, label sheets, glossy photo paper, matte card stocks, heavy art papers, etc. For example, changing the paper type setting to envelope can stop your ink jet from leaving black marks along the fold because it intelligently raises the print head. Another tip when your printer is having difficulty with very thick stocks is to try feeding the cards one at a time.
This has to be the coolest innovation that has greatly contributed to the expansion of desktop invitation printing. If you can master borderless printing, you will hardly ever need to trim something after you print, except maybe to cut it into the shape of a diaper or a leaf courtesy of our friends at AccuCut. Borderless printing is a photo printer feature that lets you print all the way to the edge of the card with no white strips at the edges. This is not available on laser printers, there you will still need to overprint with bleed and trim.
If you look at the borderless sizes available you will notice they are remarkably similar to the old photo sizes: 3.5x5, 4x6, 5x7, and 8x10. Thankfully someone thought to add 8.5x11 so we can print a full sheet borderless and then trim to any size. The Epson R2000 thoughtfully adds the ability to adjust the height of the borderless print, enabling 3.5x4 place cards, 4x7.5 menu cards or 4x9 tea length cards, and 8.5x5.5” scored A2 note cards (rotated landscape).
When you want to do borderless printing, first choose a supported size. Next, configure the printer to the correct paper size and then check the borderless option so it knows to print all the way to the edge. Finally adjust the expansion, typically to Min. Expansion is the way an ink jet printer takes a print image set up for a specific size and “expands” it to bleed slightly over all 4 edges of the card. If done right for invitations (and the R2000 is), it will expand while keeping the card centered rather than anchored at the top-left.
You may still need to do some tweaks with a fine-tuned design like this one where we printed a thin line border onto a blank white card. Here we had to “fake it” a bit by setting up the card to be slightly smaller and then setting a corresponding left printer offset to shift the printout a bit to the left and center the border on the card. This is a double-black diamond technique but you can do it too if you are patient. To print the 5 x 7 inch card shown below, we set the card size in PrintingPress to 5 x 6.95 inches. Then we set the Left Printer Offset to -0.05 inches and printed the card using the borderless printing feature with the Borderless Expansion set to Min.
(click to enlarge)
The Printer Offset also often comes in handy when trying to print creative designs onto label sheets. If you have ever tried this you know it often is off by a little bit and there is a touch of white on the left or top of all the labels on the sheet. Adjusting the printer offset setting to a small negative number (in inches) can shift the printout up or to the left to better center the prints on the labels. PrintingPress also enables a clever label “overprint” margin that lets you do a small bleed that is centered on each label but smart enough not to ever overlap another adjacent label on the sheet.
How you feed the card or envelope into the printer can often make the difference between whether or not you get to watch your favorite show before going to bed. In general you want to try to feed a card narrow-edge first into the printer. Please keep in mind that this may require you to print in Landscape mode. You may need to change the Landscape rotation setting to get it right for your printer.
When feeding envelopes, whenever possible you want to use the option in PrintingPress to Print front and back in one pass through the printer. No, this is not some sort of magic duplexer, it just specifies that you open the flap and feed the envelope bottom first. The software automatically prints the address and the return address in one pass through the printer. This form of printing reduces errors and waste because it only feeds the envelope through the printer once instead of twice, and it keeps lined envelopes thinner while going through the printer.
When printing pointed flap envelopes like those from Crane & Co., you may need to insert a cut card to prevent the printer’s sensor from thinking the paper has finished feeding because of the sloped flap.
If desktop printing has a thorn in its side it’s color matching. It can be very difficult to match a printout to a Pantone color card. The only way is to use test prints with blocks of color, which can be very time intensive. In PrintingPress Extreme, we create multiple shape objects with variations on the same color and then print to get closer to the desired color.
click to enlarge
We do provide a partial solution to this problem, through standardization. We calibrate all of our colors to the Epson R1900/2000, including our sample projects and our Mountaincow, Crane and Mountaincow Illustrations ink color menus. Since the Epson R1900/2000 printers output consistent colors from unit to unit, this enables you to output a sample project similarly to the way we designed it. If you use a different printer, we have instructions in our online searchable knowledge base telling you how to create a custom colors menu so you can store colors you use frequently with your printer.
It’s inevitable that you will eventually need help with some thorny printing problem, so you need to know where to turn first. We tell all of our software customers to come to us first. Our online searchable knowledge base can be a lifesaver by letting you know if you need to download a legacy Xerox driver for 64 bit Windows 7, telling you that you need to set the Rotate by 180 degrees option on the HP 4700, explaining that feeding partial label sheets into an HP 4700 can ruin your toner cartridge and cause repeated dots to print down the page, and letting you know that you want to turn off the OKI auto tray change option so it stops grabbing paper from the plain paper cartridge after pulling through the last envelope in the stack.
We also answer questions by email to customers using our software, providing assistance for all your custom printing. But how do we tell if you have a printer problem, a paper problem or a software problem? By narrowing down the possibilities. We will always have you test print onto plain paper so we can be sure there isn’t a problem with the printer feeding the stock you are using. We will also often print your project to a PDF so we can confirm that the PDF looks correct and we can rule out a software problem. Most of the time the problem is in the printer settings, which you now know how to configure! If you can’t print the PDF onto plain paper, then it’s time to call the printer company for help.
|
