Adobe® Acrobat® 9 PDF Bible

Chapter 32. Commercial Printing and Prepress

At some time or another, the files you output to your desktop printer may be candidates for offset printing. The tools and commands you use for desktop printers, as I explained in Chapter 31, are sufficient for printing to all the printers you have in your office and home. However, when printing PDF documents on commercial printing devices, you must address a number of issues.

For high-end digital prepress and commercial printing, Acrobat Pro and Acrobat Pro Extended include all the print controls that the commercial printing community desires. Combined with features for previewing color, preflighting jobs, and printing color separations, Acrobat Pro (henceforth meaning both Pro and Pro Extended) ranks as a strong competitor against any layout or other professional applications designed to serve creative professionals. In this chapter I cover printing from Acrobat Pro using many commercial printing tools.

Setting Up the Work Environment

In Acrobat Pro, you have a toolbar used specifically for print production. Open a context menu on the Toolbar Well and select Print Production. The Print Production toolbar opens as a floating toolbar, as shown in Figure 32.1. Select Dock Toolbars at the bottom of the context menu.

Figure 32-1. The Print Production toolbar

For printing large documents and when soft proofing files, the Loupe tool is often used. ...