Week 08 Talking Point

When working in a landscape architectural office for five years you learn a certain amount about workflows and saving files in a correct manner, and the file to printing process in order that they will print the way you want them to. But of course printing can still sometimes be a trial and error process and dependant on the printer used. Our office would often produce design drawings in PDF format, and sometimes jpg, but rarely TIFF, as clients were often less technologically savvy and felt less comfortable with TIFF and of course wanted files as small as possible. It is interesting to note the lecture emphasising TIFF is a preferred format. In any case, PDF’s were by far the preferred choice by most clients, for ease of transmission, accuracy of image, and printability. Drawings or image boards were always prepared with illustrator so a desired dpi (mostly 300 for A3 or smaller, and 200 for A2 and larger) could be selected when printing (after export to Photoshop) depending on the scale of print required. That is if a large format print was required for a presentation it was printed after being exported at the desired dpi (or resized in Photoshop) with original imagery coloured directly in illustrator and any placed images saved in a library at a minimun 300dpi as links. Any colour documents produced were always exported as TIFF’s for better colour translation and PDF’d in Photoshop, never PDF’d from a print driver. The final PDF product was of better quality according to the manner it was intended as it had been produced on the screen. In addition it also provided clients with ease of printing upon digital receipt (ie email, CD) as it was intended in terms of quality and colour and an accurate print out of the actual size of the image (drawing board) rather than a jpg printing as it resized via Windows image viewing and printing.

In terms of B & W (mostly AutoCAD design drawings) prints we often noted that transparencies would appear as black boxes when physically printed though didn’t appear on the screen as PDF, which was interestingly a problem in the top 10 PDF problems linked in the lecture. This was very uncomfortable as we never knew if they would print problematically on the clients end. Through trial and error we discovered we could print to acrobat distiller instead of directly to PDF and then convert it and this problem no longer occurred. Perhaps this is possible from graphics programmes too?