Graphic editor,Vector editor,desktop publishing and office suit software are becoming more and more powerful and sophisticated. These software are so powerful that you can’t do your work without them. These software have their own file format and the files created contain lots of information needed for the software to manipulate.
Now that you have done your art work,and ready to send to your local printer for printing. You saved your file in your USB and bring it to your local printer,then you find that your local printer is using an older (or newer) version of the software and some of your design work did not turn out properly. (Yes,sometimes a newer version of the software can’t open the older version file properly).
Your local printer will try very hard to keep their software updated,but sometimes it is just not feasible (especially the cost) to maintain all the versions. What should you do? The best file format and most welcome by your local printer are file format that are simple and without all the additional information stored by the sophisticated software. So what are these file formats?
The most simple format will be graphic format such as JPEG,GIF,PNG,TIFF,etc. You will not have any problem printing when you bring these files for your local printer. You may also eliminate the fonts problem where your local printer do not have the font type that you are using. (you may refer to our previous post on fonts). Please note that graphic file such as .psd,.psp,.xcf,.ai,etc are programs with specific file format,additional information are saved.
By now,you must be asking how can I save my word documents,or presentation slides, or my spreadsheet into graphic format? The answer is you don’t! For these type of documents you can convert it into PDF. PDF is one of the most portable document and one of the most welcome file format by your local printer. You can read more about PDF in our previous post here and how to convert here.
Even if your local printer has the exact same version of your software,you are also advised to convert your art work into graphic or PDF format. This is because those sophisticated software may take longer time to open and it will slow down the printing process.
I hope this will help you and do leave us comments if you have other solution as well.
