Digital Publishing Company

All digitisation is carried out using a PDF as the carrier of the information. In simple terms we need high-res PDFs with embedded fonts.

The following criteria are crucial.

• Fonts must be embedded.
• Pages must all be of the same size.
• Resolution must be minimum of 150 dpi.
• Logical page-naming criteria.

Fonts
All covers, contents and editorial pages must have fonts embedded in order to make the digital magazine searchable and indexed. We ask for all advertisement pages to also have fonts embedded wherever possible, but we accept that sometimes adverts are supplied as vector graphics and this is beyond the Publisher‘s control.

Common problems
Inexperienced suppliers do not know how to output PDFs with fonts embedded or understand the difference between those and PDFs as vector graphics.

Page size
Because Olive works by creating x/y coordinates of the page all of the pages in one publication must be of the same size. We ask for either all pages to be trimmed or all pages untrimmed. Inserts which are of a different page size are usually best dealt with by making them as a separate publication displayed on the landing page like this.

http://emag.digitalpc.co.uk/shg/crf0708.asp

If it is a requirement they are in the magazine we have to place images of the smaller page on a background of the magazine page using Photoshop—this is at extra cost.

Common problems
Incorrectly trimmed pages where trimmed pages are of fractionally different sizes. Advertisement pages that come from different repro houses are of different size to the editorial pages.

Resolution
Olive compresses images so we can work with 300 dpi print-ready pages. 150 dpi is ideal and 120 dpi the minimum resolution, below which the images will pixilate on zoom.

Common problems
Files supplied at web resolution (72 dpi).

Page-naming
Within Olive, each publisher and publication has a three or four letter code which is used to identify it in the repository and the stats. This is reflected in the URL.

http://emag.digitalpc.co.uk/cmpi/pwkgreen07.asp

In this example, cmpi is CMP Information (publisher) and pwk is Property Week (publication). It’s easiest if all are agreed on this code and it is used in the folder name on the FTP. Thus, cmpi is the folder into which all CMP Information publications go. Within each cmpi folder, each publication is then identified by date and each page by number. We can usually work with the naming and numbering sequence the publisher uses. We can accept single pages as individual PDFs or the whole magazine as one PDF.

Common problems
Eight out of ten magazines fail to supply some of the pages (getting pages is the biggest battle and the single biggest inhibitor to efficient production). Pages come from different sources—the publisher uploads editorial pages but the repro house(s) supply advertisement pages. Advertisement pages sent separately may not identify which page they should go on. Pages are missing or corrupt on transfer.

Production cannot be started until all pages have been supplied for each edition.