Scanning Instructions and Recommendations

Although original files are preferred, high resolution tiffs are also acceptable. Scanning poor copy with ragged edges will produce a file with, you guessed it, ragged edges. Printing it to your ink jet or laser printer may not tell you the whole story on the quality of the file.

At OWOSSO, we send your files right to the imagesetter and produce a film at 2400 dpi. It is not as forgiving as your printer. Every little jagged line will look like a jagged line. Some good rules for scanning include:

• Scan line art at 600 to 1200 dpi and save as a “bitmap tiff” to remove the screens around the edges of the image.

• Scan halftones at a dpi of 2 1/2 times the linescreen you want to print at. Save the file as a “grayscale tiff”.

• Crop the image down to just what you need to send to us. Scanning a small piece of art on an 8 1/2 X 11 page will be a huge file because all of the empty page around the image will be part of the scan and will be represented by pixels. The more pixels, the bigger the file. Monstrous files go nowhere
via e-mail.

• Refuse Jpegs and Gifs from your customers. They are great for viewing on your computer screen but are rarely high enough quality for printing.