Prepress operation refers to the preparatory work of the printing process, including typesetting and color separation scanning. The main task of the work lies in the mastery of the software used by the computer in prepress operations, the familiarity with the basic workflow of the printing process, and the ability to handle good graphic images.
At present, there is a very serious problem in prepress operations in China: Prepress operators are basically not printed professionals; students from printed schools basically do not understand prepress work. This creates a contradiction: how to deal with the combination of the desktop system's operation and printing expertise.
For designers who want to move from the computer graphic design industry to prepress operations, the first task is to control the printing expertise at any time after contact with the prepress work, otherwise it is very likely that the work will be impossible.
In order to help some of the designers who have entered the prepress production industry, based on previous personal work experience and experience, I briefly summarized the problems that some beginners often encounter, hoping to play a role.
First, the knowledge of characters Text is a writing symbol used to record and convey language.
The characters used for printing can be divided into characters, fonts, font sizes, and so on.
1. Fonts In the domestic printing industry, the main types of characters are Chinese characters, foreign characters, and national characters. Chinese characters include, for example, Songs, bodies, and black bodies. The foreign characters can be further subdivided into white and black bodies according to the coarseness of characters, or can be divided into regular bodies, italics, and flower bodies according to their appearance. The national character refers to the characters used by some minorities, such as Mongolian, Tibetan, Uighur, and Korean.
Song-style: Song-style is the most widely used font in the printing industry. According to the different shapes of words, it is divided into the book Song and the newspaper Song. Song-style is a kind of printed font that originated from the engraving and printing of the Song Dynasty. The fonts of Song fonts are square, vertical and horizontal strokes, vertical and horizontal, angular, clear structure, neat and uniform, with strong strokes regularity, so that people have a comfortable and eye-catching feeling when reading. In modern printing, it is mainly used in the body of a book or newspaper.
Body: The body, also known as living body, is a kind of font that imitates handwriting habits. The strokes are quite uniform and well-shaped, widely used in student textbooks, popular books, and endorsements.
Black body: Black body is also called square body or isoline body. It is a stout font that is literally square. The figure is dignified, the strokes are horizontal and vertical, the handwriting is all the same thickness, and the structure is eye-catching. Blackbody applies to titles or eye-catching words or comments that require attention. Because the font is too thick, it does not apply to typographical parts.
Imitation Song Style: The imitation Song Style is a relatively elegant and straight font that adopts the structure of the Song dynasty. It is used for printing subtitles, poem essays, comments, quotations, etc., and is also used to print the text in some books. section.
Art body: Art body refers to some unusual special printing fonts, generally used to beautify the layout. The strokes and structures of the art body are generally visualized. They are commonly used on the cover of the books and magazines or on the headings of the layout. Appropriate application can effectively enhance the artistic taste of prints. The types of such fonts are very extensive, such as fonts in fonts such as Han Ding and Wen Ding.
2. The font size is a measure for distinguishing the size of the text. The internationally common system is the dot system. In China, the system is based on the number system and the dot system is the supplement. The number system is based on the use of several types of movable type that are not multiplied by each other. It is a self-contained system based on the doubled or halved conversion relationship and can be divided into the fourth character system, the fifth character system, and the sixth character system. The smaller the nominal number of font size is, the larger the font size is. If the fourth character is larger than the fifth character, the fifth character will be larger than the sixth character.
Point system, also known as point system (P), is measured by calculating the "point" value of the word's appearance. According to the standards of the printing industry, the size of each point of the font size is equal to 0.35mm, and the error must not exceed 0.005mm. If the fifth character is replaced with the dot system, it is equal to 10.5 points, which is 3.675mm. All the outer texts are calculated by points. The size of each point is approximately equal to 1/72 inch, which is equal to 0.35146mm.
The size of the font size, in addition to the number system and point system, is the size of the traditional typesetting text. In mm, the unit is called "level (J or K)". Each level is equal to 0.25mm and 1mm is equal to 4 levels. The size of the text can be discharged from 7 to 62, and from 7 to 100. In the computer photocopying system, there is a bit of a system and a number system exists. When printing and typesetting, if you encounter a character marked with a number, you must convert the value of the number into a series to be able to grasp the correct size of the character. The conversion relationship between the number and the series is:
1J = 1K = 0.25mm = 0.714 points (P)
1 point (P)=0.35mm=1.4 level (J or K)
3, layout design and layout specifications Typographic layout should be based on the requirements of the layout. For example, when printing a book, you need to pay attention to the size of the book, the type of layout (horizontal or vertical), the font size of the text, the number of lines per page, the number of words per line, words and characters, and lines and lines. Intervals, the number of pages in the column and the number of words in each column, the distance between the column and the column, the placement of the page number and page number, the position and size of the header and footer, and so on.
In the text typesetting, we must also pay attention to some banned rules, such as the beginning of each paragraph to be empty two words, at the beginning of the line can not be arranged with a period, comma, burst, semicolon, colon, question mark, exclamation mark and under Quotes, lower brackets, and next-page punctuation marks cannot include upper quotation marks, upper parentheses, and uppercase names, and Chinese serial numbers such as 123, etc., numbers, years, chemical formulas, and signs before the numbers. Temperature identifiers and foreign words in single syllables should not be separated into two rows.