When a company wants to publish product information from the Web (such as that stored in data management software or on an e-commerce site) in a ready-to-print document or PDF file, some peculiarities arise, and a great deal of attention must be paid. This is because print-ready documents and PDF files have specific rules related to the long development of both the print design and typographic industries, such as the use of layouts, grids, fonts, bleeds and slugs, CMYK color spaces, and so on. Any slight imprecision in the final document could yield a less than perfect result. On paper, these are very eye-catching, and not in a good way.
For all of the reasons mentioned above, the expectations concerning a document that is going to be printed are higher than those for one destined for publication on the Web, but the fast pace of digital publishing is now dictating the cycles of the printing industry, too.
Technologies like Plytix have an “export to PDF engine,” but in most cases, the results are not perfect, and if a company aims to enhance and bend the logic of HTML to a PDF engine, the path is very hard. Sometimes, the desired results (those expected from the print medium) cannot be achieved.
The only way to guarantee the quality of a typographic document export action is for it to pass through InDesign. This is exactly the service we offer at Pagination.