Print-Ready File Checklist: Prepare Artwork for Print
A print-ready file is one that needs nothing doing to it before it reaches the press. Including overall document size, bleed, image setup, colour selection and embedded fonts. Nothing has to be moved, resized, converted or re-exported.
Below is a useful checklist for preparing a print-ready file. Run it before you send, and your artwork goes straight to proof instead of straight into a queue of questions.
What Does “Print-Ready” Mean?
You’ve invested time and money into a great design and then lose precious time to a file that won’t pass preflight.
A working file is the document you design in, it exists to be changed. A print-ready file is the final, locked output of that working file. IIt contains everything a printing press needs to print it as intended. If the printer has to open your file to resize it, add bleed, convert colour, replace a font, re-link an image – then it wasn’t print-ready.
A file that fails preflight delays the whole job. That’s why learning how to prepare artwork for printing properly is worth some of your time.
The Print Ready File Checklist
These are the eight checks we make. You don’t need design software expertise to run them as most live inside the preflight panel or the export routine of the design software you’ve used.
1. Correct document size and trim size
Build your document at the finished size it will be trimmed to. For example, A4 is 210 × 297mm, A5 is 148 × 210mm, a business card is 85 × 55mm etc. Check the page size in your document setup rather than trusting what it looks like on screen.
What goes wrong: artwork built at A4 and then scaled up to A3 shrinks the resolution of images. Artwork built at an incorrect size produces an uneven border after trimming, because the cutter has no idea where your design was supposed to stop.
2. Bleed: 3mm on every edge.
If any colour, image or background runs to the edge of the page, it must extend 3mm beyond the trim line on all four sides. A print-ready file with bleed gives the press and the guillotine room to work as the extra 3mm is trimmed away, this results in the colour running right to the edge.
Three millimetres is the standard bleed size for printing in the UK.
What goes wrong: no bleed results in white hairlines along the edge, the single most common print defect.
3. Safe margins: keep text 3–5mm inside the trim.
Bleed is what goes beyond the cut. The margin is what stays inside it. Keep everything you want to appear on the final document at least 3-5mm inside the trim line. It’s also wise to leave more room on booklets or brochures on thick paper stocks, where creep pushes inner pages outward.
We : text right up against the trim either gets clipped or ends up visibly closer to the edge on one side than the other. On a stack of 500 leaflets, that off-centre look is very hard to ignore.
4. Image resolution: 300 DPI at final printed size.
Set every placed image to 300 DPI at the size it actually appears on the page. That’s the industry benchmark for 300 dpi print and the resolution at which a photograph looks sharp to the human eye.
What goes wrong: a 72 DPI image lifted from a website looks fine on a screen but it’s too small. Print puts ink on paper at 300 pixels per inch, so the same image arrives with a quarter of the information needed and prints visibly pixelated.
5. Colour mode: CMYK, not RGB.
Commercial litho and digital presses print in four inks: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.
RGB is built from red, green, and blue light, and it contains bright greens, oranges, and electric blues that simply don’t exist in CMYK ink. This explains why the same colour can look one way on your monitor and different on paper. If you’re ever unsure whether to supply RGB or CMYK for print, the answer is always CMYK.
Plus, hex values are not print colours. Hex values describe screen colour. We don’t print in hex or RGB.
What goes wrong: converter software has to guess what an unconverted RGB colour should become. Left to the press, this shift happens without your sign-off. Convert it yourself so you see the result and approve it.
6. Fonts: embed them or convert them to outlines.
Every font used must travel inside the file, or the printer’s machine will substitute it for something it has. Embedding is usually a single tick-box in the PDF export process.
How do I convert fonts to outlines?
- Illustrator select all and go Type › Create Outlines;
- Affinity it’s Layer › Convert to Curves;
- InDesign, Type › Create Outlines for headline or logo text.
What goes wrong: If a substitute font is used, it can result in line breaks in new places, and the file that looked perfect on your screen arrives looking like somebody else’s design.
7. Single pages, not spreads.
Supply multi-page documents (suh as booklets and brochures) as single pages in the correct reading order. The printer imposes the pages onto large sheets and needs them one at a time to do it.
What goes wrong: facing spreads supplied by mistake are usually detected late. At best it’s a re-export; at worst pages print in the wrong order. Spreads are fine for a PDF you’re sharing with a client, not for a file going to press.
8. Flattened transparencies and no live layers.
Transparency, drop shadows, and blending modes can render differently on a press RIP than in your design software. Flatten or pre-render those effects before supply – PDF/X-1a does it automatically – and make sure anything on a hidden or non-printing layer is either deleted or intentionally excluded. If you’re wondering, yes, we do flatten transparencies on our side when the format requires it, but the version you approve should already be the version that prints.
What goes wrong: a shadow that flattened to 12% grey on your screen may flatten to a visible hard edge in output, and content accidentally left on a non-printing layer can vanish entirely.
What happens if I supply a file that isn’t print-ready?
Nothing catastrophic. We check every file before it goes near a press, and if something won’t print as intended, we tell you what needs changing rather than printing something that will disappoint you. We can also advise on artwork setup, though fixing and restructuring a document is usually best done by whoever built it.