Affinity Designer, best way to provide art files to a commercial printer

[Shawn Seale]

The printers we work with are all happy to receive Adobe Illustrator files, which I typically provide in a "package" format to them. I'm looking to fully transition to Affinity Designer, but I'm struggling with the best way to get art files to the printers for printing. One piece of art that we work with has a number of effects (such as knockout text or layer effects) that don't translate well to generic PDF files. What have others done to successfully work with commercial printers in terms of providing clean, high-quality source files to them?

Edited August 7, 2022 by Shawn Seale

[Komatös]

Hi @Shawn Seale

Have you already changed the export settings for the PDF output?

Select the preset "PDF (Press ready)"

[Shawn Seale]

Komatos, Yes, I've tried various PDF export options. Assuming PDF files are the best answer here, I particularly have trouble with layer effects being "honored" in the PDF creation process. Layers which have an "erase" mode, for example, appear white in the PDF, rather than the punch out effect intended. I can work around that by grouping and subtracting the "punch out" text using Shape combinations, but that does not allow me to retain the original design elements in an editable way, which is counter to what I'm after. I also don't know how you get to the "Nothing will be rasterized" setting on the PDF export. No matter how I set things in the "More..." menu, I am still getting "Some areas will be approximated" message. Thanks for any help/ideas that you my have on this.

sticker sketch 2022.pdf

Edited August 7, 2022 by Shawn Seale

[tudor]

10 hours ago, Shawn Seale said:

Layers which have an "erase" mode, for example, appear white in the PDF, rather than the punch out effect intended.

Most blending modes must be rasterized when you prepare the file for printing. That’s okay. The erase mode in particular will never work in print the way you see it on screen in RGB mode.

[PaulEC]

11 hours ago, Shawn Seale said:

I can work around that by grouping and subtracting the "punch out" text using Shape combinations, but that does not allow me to retain the original design elements in an editable way,

I'd suggest keeping two versions of the file, an editable version and one that has been optimised for printing.

[Shawn Seale]

Thanks for those responses. In terms of preparing the Erase blending mode layers for printing, the successful approach seems to be using the Shape combinations to cut out the text, rather than just rasterizing the layers. This appears to retain the vector-based graphics in the PDF file and does also get me to the "nothing will be rasterized" message at PDF export, which somehow makes sense.

[lacerto]

If you do the Boolean operations by holding down the Alt key (to produce compound objects), you retain editability of elements (including text) even if when exporting, the text objects used in Boolean operations will be converted to curves.

When you use blend modes, the involved objects will always be rasterized (and if you prevent that by using an export option, you will lose the blend effect, as when using "Erase", nothing will be erased but the text object on which the blend mode is applied, is simply just converted to curves).

sticker sketch 2022_fixed.afdesign

[Shawn Seale]

40 minutes ago, lacerto said:

If you do the Boolean operations by holding down the Alt key (to produce compound objects), you retain editability of elements (including text) even if when exporting, the text objects used in Boolean operations will be converted to curves.

Compound objects for the major win! 😎