General instructions on how to prepare your work for mail order printing, delivery, discounts, colour ink, Catford Print Centre

An overview of Catford Print Centre mail order printers and general instructions on how to prepare your work for printing including delivery, colour ink and discounts.

ORDERING INSTRUCTIONS

Please read our Terms & Conditions as all orders are only accepted on the strict understanding that these terms and conditions will form the only contract between yourself and Catford Print Centre.

How long will it take? All orders are dealt with on a first come - first served basis and usually leave our office within a week of us receiving your correctly prepared originals unless lengthy pre-press work is involved or the order is particularly large or complicated. If you have a deadline to meet we recommend that you book in your job by phone whereupon we will be able to give you a definate date for printing.

Sending in your order. We suggest you use Royal Mail Special Delivery which costs about £4.00 but remember we need to receive hard copy artwork by noon on the day prior to printing and at least 24 hours earlier if sending it on disk.

V.A.T. Please be aware that all prices shown are PLUS VAT where appropriate. In general booklets and books are zero rated unless they are designed to be written in. Leaflets sometimes are and sometimes are not. VAT rules are a minefield and a brief explanation can be found HERE.

The prices quoted are for account customers. If you do not have a credit account with us then you will have to send in payment with your order. We offer a discount for payment with order as follows.

Orders Up To £950	Deduct 5%
Orders Over £950	Deduct 7.5%
Orders Over £1,750	Deduct 10%
Orders Over £2,800	Deduct 12.5%
Orders Over £4,100	Deduct 15%
These cwo discounts apply to charges for printing, artwork, screening, folding etc. They DO NOT apply to delivery charges, 3rd party services, laminating, metal plates or where cwo prices are specified. Paper Back Books have already been discounted.

Delivery Is By Parcel Force
Delivery times are 9am - 5.30pm, Monday - Friday. The parcel will need to be signed for. Please note that Parcel Force DO NOT offer compensation for delayed parcels and therefore neither can we unless you request our consequential loss insurance.

Orders Over £100 (ex. Vat)	Sent to most UK addresses* FREE OF CHARGE by our Next Day Delivery Service.
Orders Between £30 - £100 (ex. Vat)	Sent to most UK addresses* FREE OF CHARGE by our 2-3 day service. Next Day Delivery Service is available for most UK addresses* at an extra cost of £5 + VAT.
Orders under £30 (ex. Vat)	A "Small Order Delivery Supplement" of £7 + VAT for our Next Day Service and £3 + VAT for our 2-3 Day Service.
*Scotland/Cornwall/West Country Delivery to the following areas takes 1 extra day: Some areas of Aberdeen, Dundee, Falkirk, Inverness, Kilmarnock, Kirkwall, Paisly, Perth, Holy Island and Lerwick. Also some parts of Cornwall and the West Country.
*Other Areas Delivery to the following Post Code areas are sent by our standard service even if your order exceeds £100 and takes 3-4 days. A 2-3 day service is available at an extra cost of £11 + VAT per box. IV 1-36, 40-49, 51-56, KW 1-17, PA 20-49, 60-78, 80-00, PH 17-26, 30-44, KA 27-28, HS 1-9, ZE 1-3, Northern Ireland, Isle of Man and the Isles of Scilly.
Overseas Overseas, Channel Islands* & The Irish Republic. Delivery charges available on request.

Where delivery is included in the price we can obviously offer you a discount if you collect the work. For the majority of cases this is 7%. In some cases it is 4%.

Pre or Post Press services do not add to the weight of the parcel are not therefore eligible to receive this discount. Principal exclusions are artwork, folding, screening, colour ink or 2 colour work.

Our standard prices are for printing in black ink. To print in an alternative colour you can choose one of our standard colours for an extra £15. You could elect to have just the outer cover of your booklet printed in a standard colour ink with the inner pages in black or perhaps the entire booklet in printed in the same colour ink.

Standard Colours
When we refer to a standard colour these are (pantone numbers in brackets):

Red (185), Red (485), Blue (300), Green (354), Brown (464), Orange (021), Maroon (200), Violet, Process Blue, Reflex Blue, Warm Red, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow or Purple.

Non Standard Colours
If you have a specific pantone number in mind we can mix this ink as closely as possible at a charge of £25. Do remember that inks reproduce different shades on glossy or coloured stock than on white paper.

Two Colour Printing
Supplements for 2 colour printing are usually shown separately on each of our web pages.

For simple text and line art work we prefer to have Hard Copy - the actual sheets from your laser printer. The most important factor here is that the finished product will only be as good as the Hard Copy you send us. Black originals will reproduce as black - grey originals will be faint and the text will start to break up.

Always print out your hard copy on white 80gsm bond paper. Avoid using coloured or thin paper. If you include hand drawn line art always use a black pen - never blue or a pencil.

We will reduce your originals to the correct size ourselves.

Margins
You must leave a margin on all 4 edges of your paper of 13mm if you are sending in hard copy at the correct size. Leave 18mm if we are to reduce it to half size.

Booklets
The page count must always be divisible by 4 (ie. 12, 16, 20 pages etc.) and remember that the cover counts as 4 pages for costing purposes. Any blank pages should be clearly indicated and are charged for at the normal rate. If you do not shown page numbers in your booklet then please mark the reverse of each original in pencil. The cover should be page 1, inside front cover page 2 and so on.

Graphics
Photos and tinted clip art will always reproduce poorly from hard copy.

Bromides
If some of your work contains graphics and is supplied on disk and the rest is Hard Copy we can output the computer pages for you to bromide. This method provides a far superior reproduction of photos and tinted graphics. Cost is £6 per A4, £10 per A3. See our requirements on the next page.

Photo Scanning
Alternatively, if you are unable to scan to a good standard why not leave exact gaps in your Hard Copy where the photos should go. We can then scan them for you in black & white at a charge of £4 each for the first 10, thereafter at £3 each.

For simple text and line art work we prefer to have Hard Copy - the actual sheets from your laser printer. However, if you do not have access to a good quality printer then we can produce the hard copy for you FREE OF CHARGE from your disk providing you follow a few simple requirements (See Later On).

Computer To Plate
Providing you prepare your work correctly and supply us with everything we need then jobs containing photos and tinted graphics can now be processed in their entirety electronically to output high quality printing plates FREE OF CHARGE via our new "Computer To Plate" processor. This CTP system operates via Adobe PDF so it is vital that you follow our requirements exactly as we have very little scope to correct any errors or omissions by you.

Software Programmes
We are Authorised Adobe Network Solutions Service Providers and can therefore accept any Adobe software - PageMaker, Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat PDF, InDesign as well as Quark & Corel Draw. Microsoft Publisher, Word and Power Point are not really suitable where accurate colour printing is required. All we can say with these programmes is that we'll give it a go. We usually can get acceptable results. If you are going to publishing regularly then we suggest you consider upgrading to Adobe InDesign or QuarkXpress.

Adobe PDF
As we are Authorised Adobe Network Solutions Service Providers we operate a PDF workflow and our prefered format is a Press Optimised PDF. There is no need to send us anything else unless for some reason you are unable to embed a font in the PDF in which case you must send the font to us and let us know that you haven't embedded it. We'll try to sort it out.

Requirements
Once you have printed out your FINAL Hard Copy we need you to send us the following WITHOUT EXCEPTION.

a) All fonts that were used in the job. If Postcript fonts were used we need both the screen font and the printer font.
b) All graphics (eps, jpeg, tiff etc.) should also be supplied - at 300dpi of course.
c) FINAL Hard Copy (no matter how bad).

Possible Pitfalls

Fonts
Some fonts (mainly PC) do not allow for embedding in PDF's (the format we need to create so we can output your job to our CTP system) and will default to the dreaded COURIER font. You may need to check the web site of the company from whom you obtained the font to see if they have issued a new set of fonts which allow for embedding in PDF's.

Menu Styling
You will have noticed that some fonts have up to 4 different versions (Plain, Bold, Italic and Bold & Italic) whilst others have just a plain name. If you want a font to appear bold or in italics and the bold or italic version is available you MUST use this one. If you use the plain version and apply "bold", "italic" or "bold & italic" via the font styling menu it may default to PLAIN. Even if a "bold" or "italic" version is unavailable you may find that the font does not allow to be stylised via the menu and although it will appear fine on the screen or on your own Hard Coy, it may print as either plain or as Courier as Menu Styling is designed for Desktop Printers and not High End Professional Plate Setters.

Photos & Tinted Graphics
These should be at 300 dpi. Line art should be scanned in at 1200 dpi. If you do not follow these rules the photos will appeared pixelated.

Bleed
If printed data is to go right up to the edge of a sheet then you will have to "bleed" the image off the edge of the page by 3mm (This is not possible in Word). No important printed data (text etc.) should be closer than 5mm from the edge of the page. We may charge extra for pages with bleed. Please phone to discuss.

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