Print-ready files in Scribus

Not every technical writing assignment involves a word processor like Word or LibreOffice, or a document markup system like DITA or Markdown. Sometimes, technical writers need to create a flier for a conference, or a postcard for a customer mailer.

These documents are examples of print-ready files. This is a printing industry term that means the document is ready to go to press. More practically, a print-ready document is usually a PDF that includes special indicators that a print shop can use to print and trim the document.

What are print-ready files

Fliers and postcards that have colors and shapes that extend to the edge of the paper are produced in a print-ready format. A print-ready file essentially means that the document has been prepared with some allowance for the printer to cut the final product down to size. By extending shapes and color areas beyond the "cut marks," you can effectively produce a document with color that extends to the edge of the paper.

The space outside the cut marks is called the "bleed area." When you prepare a print-ready document for printing, ask the person who will do the printing what minimum bleed area they need; they can give you the dimensions to use. Most modern printers can use a fairly small bleed.

Inside the printable area of the print-ready document, you can place any object, shape, color, or image. Because documents can move around a little bit during the cut process after printing, you'll usually want to consider a "safety margin" inside the print area. This might be equal to the bleed dimension; your printer will usually suggest a safety margin to use.

To help align printed material for the cut process, your printer may also ask for "registration marks." These are special marks that get printed in the bleed area that help the printer ensure that pages are lined up correctly before cutting. Not every printer needs registration marks; ask your printer when preparing your document.

If color fidelity is very important in your print job, you might consider adding "color bars" to the output. This allows the printer to verify that the colors have been printed accurately before committing to the rest of a print run. However, some printers generate their own color bars when they print, so this step may not be necessary.

Print-ready files in Scribus

Scribus is an open source desktop publishing application that produces print-ready documents. I often use Scribus when I need to create fliers and postcards to give out at conferences. It's also a useful tool to create my own business cards. Let's explore Scribus by creating an empty document and exporting a print-ready PDF.

When you start Scribus, you'll be prompted for the dimensions of your document. The standard dimensions are a US Letter document at eight and a half inches wide and eleven inches tall with a safety margin of 0.5556 inches.

In the upper-right of the dialog bog, I defined the document as five inches wide and three inches tall. In the lower-left of the dialog box, I set the safety margin to a quarter-inch.

Click the Bleeds tab to define the bleed area for your document. I set my bleed area to a quarter-inch, the same as my print margin.

After defining your document, click Ok to open the document in Scribus. The empty document will show a printable page that's a bit larger than the five inches by three inches of our final document. That's because the document includes a quarter-inch bleed on the top, bottom, left, and right, giving a final document dimension of five and a half inches wide and three and a half inches tall.

The red border shows the final printable area of the document. Just inside the red border is a blue border, which indicates the safety margin of the document. If the final printed document moves around a bit during the cutting process, the content inside the safety area will still show up on the printed page. That's why the safety margin is usually defined as less than or equal to the bleed dimension.

To generate a PDF from this empty file, use File > Export > Save as PDF. This brings up a new dialog box where you can select specific output options. Click the Pre-Press tab to verify that your output file will use the same document bleeds; the checkbox for this should already be ticked.

You can also set what printer marks to put in the print-ready output file. Ask your printer what marks they prefer. When I print my fliers and postcards, my printer needs only the crop marks.

However, I've selected all of the printer marks in this example so we can see what the output looks like:

The short lines in each of the corners represent the cut marks. These lines tell the printer how to cut or crop the output to the correct dimensions. My sample document used a quarter-inch bleed area, so these cut marks are a quarter-inch from the top, left, right, and bottom edges of the output.

The dashed "boxes" in the corners indicate the bleed marks. This can be a useful guide for some printers who need to see the bleed area. These marks essentially indicate "this is the waste area" to the printer.

The "target" symbols centered on the top, left, right, and bottom are the registration marks. Some printers need these special markings to help align the paper for cutting. Lining up a page so it is in the correct orientation is called "registration."

The gray boxes and colored boxes are the color bars and are used by some printers to verify the colors are correct. Printing color is subtractive, and uses a combination of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ("CMYK") to create different colors. That's why the first four boxes in the list of colors are cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. If these color bars show streaks or lines, the printer knows to add more toner to the printer, or to clean the print heads.

A brief introduction to print-ready files

While larger organizations may have a dedicated graphics design department to manage such requests, small and midsize organizations will often ask the technical writer to produce these documents. These technical writers will need to bring skills in desktop publishing to do this part of the job.