PHOTO-OFFSET ARTWORK

Artwork used in photo-offset printing includes line art and halftone art. These are covered in the information that follows.

Line Art

Line art (illustrations, rules, headlines, borders, cartoons, crossword puzzles) and any other piece of solid-color art to be included on the paste-up should be enlarged or reduced to the exact size allotted for it on the layout sheet. Type proofs must be carefully checked to see that the lines of type are straight and the proofs are pasted down square with the page. These proofs, as well as art, must be handled with great care. The camera records every error and every smudge of a careless paste-up. For you to corrector eradicate such errors is always costly and often impossible after the plates are made.

Ordinarily, light-blue lines are used on the paste-ups to indicate margins. Light blue will not show up in the final photography. If necessary, you can draw in blue lines yourself, but in a week-to-week operation, it is much better to have them printed on standard layout sheets. Check with your publisher for advice before having your layout sheets printed on the various types of margins that should be marked - and on the amount of extra white space to leave for the publisher to work with. Any lines you want to appear on the finished page must be drawn or pasted in, in black, on the paste-up sheet. Only lines in black india ink will reproduce clearly on the offset plates.

There is also a number of alphabets printed on sheets of transparent acetate or cellophane you may use for headlines. These sheets have adhesive on one side for pastedown purposes. When using them, you simply cut out the letters with a knife and apply them to the paste-up. Paste-up and pressure transfer alphabets are known by their trade names, such as Formatt and Artype. Figure 8-2 shows how paste-up lettering is prepared. Another preferred method is to draw guidelines on the

Figure 8-2. - Paste-up lettering.

Figure 8-3. - Presure-transfer lettering.

paste-up in light-blue pencil then to position each letter in its proper place.

Pressure-transfer lettering (fig. 8-3) is similar to paste-up lettering, since the letters of the alphabet are printed on acetate sheets. However, instead of cutting the letter out of the acetate sheet and attaching it to the paste-up, you simply move the sheet until the desired letter is in the proper position; then you rub the front of the sheet with a pencil or burnisher. When pressure is applied, the letter transfers from the back of the acetate sheet directly to the paste-up. You can remove a pressure-transfer letter with an ordinary pencil eraser, X-acto knife or masking tape.

One disadvantage of using printed lettering sheets is that when you run out of frequently used letters, you have to acquire a new sheet.

In addition, there are several "headliner" machines on the market that produce display matter photographically. The heads are set in long lines or strips that are then trimmed and pasted in place on the layout. Headline preparation is covered in Chapter 9.

Halftones

Photographs cannot be pasted onto the layout with type and line art because they must be photographed through a halftone screen. Therefore, they are often shot as separate negatives and then spliced into the master (line) negative of the page before the plate is made. With this method, only the shape and size of the halftone are indicated on the page layout. This is accomplished in several ways. The simplest is to "mask out" the area where the halftone will be positioned with india ink or black paper. Another way is for you to square off the space on the paste-up, putdown a piece of red adhesive film and cut it to fit the halftone area. The camera photographs the red the same as black. The red cellophane is more expensive, but it is much easier to use and often more accurate. Red or black space on the paste-up appears as clear space on the negative. It serves as a window through which the platemaker can accurately position the halftone negative into the line negative.

Another method is to print the photograph to size, screen it and paste it in place on the layout sheet before making the page negative.

Either method may be used at the publisher's discretion. However, your concern will be with submitting the artwork to the publisher in the proper form with the appropriate guidelines explaining your requirements, rather than the mechanics of printing.

There are three ways to submit your photographs to the publisher. They are as follows:

1. When photographs are printed or cropped to the exact size they are to appear in the publication (a "one-to-one shot" in printing terminology), they may be mounted in their predetermined position on a separate layout sheet. Therefore, you will submit two paste-ups - one containing the line work and the other the halftones.

2. When photographs are to be reduced or enlarged, crop or scale them to indicate the desired size. Cropping and scaling will be covered later in this chapter.

3. When a halftone is to be of an irregular shape, the preparation procedure is somewhat different. In this case, a "window" for the platemaker is needed. You can make the window as follows: paste the actual photograph in position on the line paste-up, attach a clear acetate sheet over it, then, with red or black opaque paint, carefully paint in the area indicated by the outline of the photograph under the acetate. There is also a special material - a red-coated acetate - that can be used to outline the illustration. This red is translucent and can be scraped away from the outside outline of the halftone, leaving the red shape for the camera to record as the window. If the job is very complicated, it is better for you to let the publisher do that kind of preparation. A good publisher will advise you on the best method of preparing photographs for photo-offset printing,

Be sure to protect your paste-ups carefully. If they are damaged - or if they get dirty - you may have to start over. It is a good idea to cover them with a tissue overlay and to protect them between layers of cardboard when taking them from one place to another.