More often than not, what you see in your screen and what comes out of your laser printer doesn’t mean that you’ll also get the same results when you send them out to your printing house. Even with a high-resolution imagesetter, your marketing campaign material may not come out the way you imagined it to be.

Particularly when it comes to your text, when you don’t have the same software program commonly used by your printing house, your marketing material would surely come out less than what you expect and you might just be frustrated when you’re billed the same amount.

Here’s a list of text printing tips that you can use to get the electronic file output the way you actually imagined it:

Printing Tip 1 – When you’re using programs such as Freehand or Illustrator, never try to use the “Outline" command for your style sheet, as well as the “Shadow" prompt for your typeface. Rather, use a drawing program or a page layout program where you can have greater control of your outlines.

Printing Tip 2 – If you’re going to use a high resolution imagesetter to produce your print materials, do not use the style menu to turn your typeface into “bold" or “italic". It is more than likely that your print job would come out wrong. Always remember that a laser printer can actually print most of your typeface effects by altering them; a high resolution imagesetter does not have this capability.

Printing Tip 3 – Convert and outline your font in programs such as Illustrator or Freehand. It is easier this way because you don’t have to list the font anymore when you send them to your printing house. On their end, your print shop also would not have any problems changing your fonts or line-breaking your text.

Printing Tip 4 – Avoid using fonts which were named after cities – Geneva, New York, etc. These are not made for high end quality output. An exception would be “Memphis", which is actually a real typeface.

Printing Tip 5 – If all else fails, you can always use QuarkXPress to improve on your typography. What can you do with QuarkXPress as your print assistant?

1 – You can change the default setting of your font to turn on the kerning qualities of your typography.

2 – You can adjust the settings to create a tighter and more professional look with the spaces between words.

3 – You can also set up the paragraph tracking to improve the appearance of your text.

And…

4 – Make sure that your subheads stay with your text paragraph even if you move your paragraph.