Whilst an image may seem to be of high enough quality for print on your computer screen it is not necessarily good enough for print. Computer screens often project at 72dpi or on occasion at 96dpi. To produce a print item of industry standard, our printers output at 300dpi.

To find out what size your PDF is, you can do the following:

1. Open your PDF

2. Click on File in the top left

3. Scroll down and click on Properties

4. Towards the bottom of the window you will see the PDF Page Size: e.g. 210 x 297 mm

5. Once you have your PDF page size this can be referenced to the table below.

We cannot print an A6 sized PDF if you select and A5 flyer.

You can check your images DPI before you create your PDF by:

1. Right click on the image file.

2. Scroll down and click on Properties.

3. Click on the sub-tab Details.

4. Scroll down the image details and you will see Horizontal resolution/Vertical resolution dpi.

If you are not sure if you have a PDF file, you can check by doing the following:

1. Right click on the file icon.
2. Scroll down to the bottom and left click on Properties.
3. You will then see under the document name, "Type of file: Adobe Acrobat Document (.pdf)".

If you don't see this, it is not a compatible document for print.

Visual identification:

If your document is saved on your desktop, you should see an icon similar to the below image:

Images that are lower than 300DPI can be amended in programmes such as Photoshop, but this will not improve the quality of the image. If you change an image from 72DPI to 300DPI, whilst this will meet our upload criteria, it will not produce a sharp image.

The only way to improve image quality is to go back to your camera/source document and take a higher mega pixel photograph or to rework the original design.

Bleed: Is the term used for objects that overlap the border of your document.

See the orange rectangle in the below image. If you imagine the grey rectangle to be a typical A4 page size on the pdf; an image that bleeds correctly continues off of the page past the grey rectangle. For backgrounds that you want printed flush to the edge, make sure that your PDF background goes to the edge of the page.

When documents are uploaded without bleed we will upscale your artwork to create bleed typically at 1%. This then allows our printers to cut to the edge of the page avoiding the risk of any unwanted white borders. We advise that all PDFs should be supplied with a 3mm bleed around. Bleed ensures that your artwork images will be cut to the edge without a risk of a white border or cutting off wording/images.

Crop Marks: If you are able to, always include crop marks on your PDF as this tells the printer where to trim your artwork with correct trim sizes. Crop marks look like right angles in the corners of your PDF as shown below:

Page layout: Always leave a 3mm gap from the edge of the artwork to avoid text and images from being cut off.

We accept packaged InDesign folders for upload as editable template. If you do not have InDesign files, we can convert other file formats on a POA basis.

When printing your PDF we require all fonts to be embedded within the document. We need embedded fonts so that our printer can correctly interpret your text if not supplied as an image. Without fonts being supplied the printer will not be able to match the exact type setting style you have chosen. There should be a tick box in the PDF output settings options stating “embed fonts into PDF” make sure this box is ticked.

When supplying fonts for your editable templates, these must be in windows format and either .TTF or .OTF

Lamination is a thin layer of plastic that is adhered onto your document. The plastic laminate is glued on to the paper and can sometimes make print appear slightly lighter due to the ammonia in the glue. We offer a gloss or matt laminate for our print items. A laminate will give your print an added feel of thickness.

Paper weight is measured in Grams per Square Meter (GSM). Therefore if you were to select a 300gsm paper weight this is what the paper would weigh at 1m². As a guide your office printer will print on 100gsm paper.

Images can come in two different forms. A vector format file is made from mathematical calcu so that irrespective of the size of the image, image quality remains unaffected.

More commonly found are images that are made up of dots. Typically files such as .jpg .png and .tiff will be made up of dots. As these images have a set number of dots per inch, if you stretch your images out further the dots become further apart.

As the dots become further apart the image will appear more pixilated and blurred. Therefore the more dots per inch the higher the quality of the image.

Whilst an image can look fine on your computer screen, it is printed at a much higher resolution.

1. If you print screen and paste the image into paint or similar and save.

2. Embedding images in Word documents

3. Taking images from emails

4. Using images from websites