Featured Prepress Tip

Creating a Virtual Printer for EWP

PC:
In general we have people install a virtual printer using the Panther Pro 62 PPD and use an application called Winsteng.exe to be the add a printer wizard. (both are available on our ftp site in the from_eagle folder) or you can use the Windows Printer wizard. You double click on the winsteng.exe or start the wizard. You want to create a local printer using the FILE port, sometimes it is listed as a Print to File port. When it asks for the printer type you need to browse to the Panther PPD folder and work your way down to the ROMAN folder and select the PPD for your recorder (Panther Pro 46). Then tell it not to be the default printer and you do not want to print a test page. Their are also no installable options. You then need to navigate to the ROMAN folder again and right click on the PPD and use the Install command if it is available. If it is not available you need to copy the proper PPD into the same directory that your PPD are held in. In Quark you can use the PPD manage to figure out where your PPD are kept. In Pagemaker they need to reside in the PPD4 folder inside of the Pagemaker Application folder. InDesign uses the default windows PPD directory based on your operating system, just do a search for *.ppd For the Windows printer wizard you will be asked to find the pscript.dll, you can browse to it here... C://windows/system32/spool/ drivers/w32x86/ in one of the folders there

MAC:
Mac based users need to create a virtual printer in Chooser (OS 9.0 and below) or a "localhost" printer in OS X and higher in the Printer Utility tool. When it asks for the printer type you need to browse to the Panther PPD folder and work your way down to the ROMAN folder and select the PPD for your recorder (Panther Pro 62 or 48). Then tell it not to be the default printer and you do not want to print a test page. Their are also no installable options. You need to copy the proper PPD into the same directory that your PPD are held in. In Quark you can use the PPD manage to figure out where your PPD are kept. In Pagemaker they need to reside in the PPD4 folder inside of the Pagemaker Application folder. InDesign uses the default PPD directory based on your operating system, there are several libraries that contain PPD info depending on the logged on user.

We then have the customer write a PS file using our PPD. We prefer a Composite CMYK color, 106 line and 2400 resolution file for the papers and 150 line 2540 resolution for commercial sheet work. Paper sizes used are letter extra for sigs, tabloid extra for tabs and 18x24 for newspapers. Pages are to be "centered on page" and binary in data format. Download all fonts (Postscript and Truetype).

We then have them use Acrobat Distiller to make a PDF file for us to rip. The job option in Acrobat 7 should be set to PDF X 1A 2001, all other versions use the PRESS setting or even better download our EWP job option and copy that to the settings folder in Distiller.