Electronic Material Handling

not all campaigns are created equally…

In order to provide our clients with a seamless transfer of electronic ad material, each piece of creative is subjected to a rigorous pre-flighting and trouble-shooting exercise. In general, the amount of time necessary to complete the pre-flighting and dissemination process varies from campaign to campaign. For example, campaigns that incorporate only one or two pieces of material will take a short amount of time to prepare before we make it available to the publications. However, those campaigns that require additional attention such as separate material for each newspaper or ones that necessitate pub-setting will take more time to coordinate. Clients are asked to provide AWNA with as much lead time as possible when it comes to 'special circumstance' projects.

We realize and appreciate that a huge investment is made in the 'creative' for community newspaper campaigns. For this reason, we want to take every step possible to ensure that the material is reproduced and appears as it was intended to. From the time we receive your material, it undergoes a battery of checks during the pre-flight stage to virtually guarantee proper replication newspaper by newspaper. When we're confident that ALL publications planned for the campaign are ready for your material, it is posted to a secure ftp site where the newspaper can retrieve it. However, it is also understood that not all campaigns (or ad material) are created equal. In the event that your material requires special attention, or minor modifications, AWNA is at your service to fix or advise of technical problems on your behalf. For pub-set copy, simply provide us with your standardized material built to spec, a list of dealers or market specific information and we'll take care of the rest.

PDF Production Guidelines

Download PDF Production Guidelines 20 KB

Fonts

All fonts must be embedded. We prefer that you turn subsetting off. When possible, use Type 1 Postscript fonts instead of Truetype fonts. Please do not use CID (AKA OpenType or Multi-byte) or Multiple Master fonts.

Image Resolution

Distiller should be set for Bicubic Downsampling to 200 dpi for Color and Grayscale Bitmap Images, and 600 dpi for Monochrome Bitmap images.

Image Compression

Grayscale and colour images should be compressed using ZIP compression and a quality setting of 8-Bit. Please do not set image compression to JPEG or AUTOMATIC. Black and white line art images should be compressed using ZIP or CCIT Group 4 compression.

Process Colour Ads

Please provide a composite (CMYK) version of any process color ads. Pre-separated files are no longer necessary.

Spot Colour Ads

Please provide a composite spot-color PDF file. Also provide a CMYK composite file (for papers that run the ad on a CMYK page). Pre-separated files are no longer necessary.

Adobe InDesign

Write a Postscript file using File/Print. Then distill the Postscript file using Adobe Acrobat. EPS files from InDesign and Quark sometimes leave out necessary elements.

Colour Settings

Colour settings should be set to “Leave Color Unchanged.” Overprint settings should be “Preserved”, but turn off Undercolor Removal, Transfer Functions and Halftone Information. In any version of Distiller (except v.4) set Transfer Functions to “Apply”. Users of Distiller 4 should turn off “Preserve Transfer Functions.”

Security Settings

Please do not enable any security settings. Proof your PDF. Please print and review a copy of the finished PDF file before submitting it. Check particularly to ensure that fonts are embedding properly. Acrobat 6.0 Professional users should check the color separations using Acrobat Professional’s color separation tool.

Black & White Ads

Please do not use colour of any kind in a black and white ad. Do not assume that newspapers will print your ad in grayscale to remove colour. Your ad may appear on a page that is being colour separated. Acrobat 6.0 Professional users should check the color separations to using Acrobat’s color separation tool.

Advanced Distiller Settings

In Distiller’s Advanced settings, turn on “Preserve Level 2 Copypage Semantics.” “Preserve OPI Information” must be turned off.

File Compression

PDF files, by definition, are compressed. However, it is a good idea to archive prior to transmission using Stuffit (Macintosh) or ZIP (Windows) to avoid corruption during transmission.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact AWNA’s Display Ad Coordinator Katherine Seely or phone (780) 434-8746 (226).