[OS X TeX] Preparation of illustrations for press

[William Adams]

On Mar 25, 2008, at 4:15 PM, Alan Litchfield wrote:

> There is no point in having your images scanned at 800 dpi. The  
> platesetter
> will only work with 300dpi images


Wrong.

A platesetter will make use of whatever pixel or dot information is  
available, mapping it into its halftone grid according to the RIP  
software --- w/ FM screening, one can get improvements for CT images  
almost all the way up to the DPI of the output device.

If it's at all possible, re-draw the images in a vector program,  
otherwise Springer's guidelines are reasonable, except the terminology  
is wrong:

halftones - 300 ppi (a CT image, w/ a range of grey or colour values)
combination - 600 ppi (a CT image w/ b/w elements, say text or lines  
--- if possibly composite this so that there's no anti-aliasing for  
the text / lines)
line drawings - 1200 _dpi_ --- an image of just b/w elements, texts,  
lines, solid areas w/ any grey values represented by some sort of  
modulation of dots / circles / other shapes

> So far I have a few full colour illustrations, approximately 10 x 15  
> cm, scanned at 800 dpi and saved as pdfs in photoshop. This produces  
> quite large image  files, around 24MB, and both TeXshop preview and  
> Acrobat Reader take a long time todisplay these pages (I realise  
> that I can use draft mode when working on the text)


You're overscanning. Determine the output size, then set to 300ppi,  
then colour correct, clean up and unsharp mask or other filter to  
sharpen. .pdf file format will be fine.

William

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications