Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #talesfromtheprintshop, aggregated by home.social.
Perhaps you’ve caught a few of my toots about a massive order of 1,200 24-page booklets I’ve been working on that print slowly due to the use of a glossy cover sheet.
And perhaps you questioned my estimate that I could only run about 100 a day because of taking about 4 hours (plus time for paper and toner replenshing and sometimes spanning a lunch break) and needing the remaining time for other jobs.
Well today, I bring receipts! (Explanation in the ALT texts.)
Well, that was fun! Halfway through the next batch of booklets I’m printing, I hear the machine come to a stop. I walk over and the touchscreen interface is unresponsive. Completely frozen up. Turned off the regular power switch, intending to reboot it, and nothing happens! Had to get behind the machine and pull the power completely out of the wall socket!
Because I’m a sucker who actually cares, just e-mailed the customer to say if their designer can’t coax the #AIslop tool to place the correct logo, just delete it and I’ll lay it in for them. Yes, I’d rather do that than risk them printing the item somewhere else with the borked logo.
Dear customers: I am forbidden from reproducing #AIslop distortions of an official logo that misrepresent our branding.
@bigzaphod Crazy tale. Makes me think of my situations but exactly opposite—telling people blatantly, as a professional, the art they sent for me to print is gonna look like $𝓱¡† for XYZ reasons (I imagine you see some of my #TalesFromThePrintShop posts), and they don’t really care and expect me to make it look good anyway.
Sadly the OCD perfectionist in me usually does manage it, somehow.
Print order in. 50 4x6 cards.
“I can actually give you 150 and still be under my minimum order charge. Can you use that many? (I’d only print the extras if you can use them.)”
“Sounds great.” [texts an additional image] “Can I also have 25 of these?”
[art is letter size proportions]
“Okay, 25 of the letter size and back to original 50 4x6 comes to just 3 cents over my minimum charge.”
“So I want 2 letter size and 30 4x6.”
“Plus the original 50 4x6?”
“Right.”
😣😩
RE: https://mastodon.social/@amyworrall/117356500721362635
If I wasn’t locked into a workflow of using impose/compose tools in Fiery Command Workstation, this looks like EXACTLY the alternate tool I’d need.
One *might* assume a booklet trimming attachment could report back to its parent production copier that the paper trim waste bins are full and to pause copying instead of letting them continue to fill so much that it trips the jam sensor and causes a train wreck of paper through the entire print path starting way back at the source paper drawers.
One would be entirely wrong on that assumption.
I have no recollection what movie or TV show it was, but I distinctly remember a scene, possibly in a comedy, when an air traffic controller was bragging about having planes stacked up in some hilarious pattern before bringing them in one after another.
In unrelated news, I spent the last half hour of my workday preflighting and queuing up more than a half dozen print jobs to run one after another tomorrow morning.
Oh, fun fact - the border art for the inside pages DID have bleed, just that the PDF wasn't saved in a manner to reveal it! Opening a sample page spread in Illustrator revealed the bleed that I was able to use on an InDesign master page. #TalesFromThePrintShop
Morning task: process a PDF from Brazil intended to be printed as a booklet, but it’s European A5 size and not US Half Letter, and all pages have art reaching the edge of the page with no bleed/crops provided.
Yay Illustrator for letting me separate the inside page borders from the PDF to use as a resized master page and delete the incorrect size border from all the inside pages.
And yay Photoshop for generative filling the front and back cover to add 1/8 inch of bleed.
Nothing like ruining a complete sheet of not-exactly-cheap Avery labels because you printed something meant for regular paper and forgot you had the sheet of labels in the bypass tray ready to be printed right after the regular sheet. 🤦🏻♂️
Yep. Subtracting paper outage time and a lunch break, it's more like around 3.5 hours per 100!
Holy guacamole was I absolutely incorrect about the 90 minutes per 100 booklets!!! I started this batch about 9:15am. Right now I'm just shy of 12:15pm and they're only about 3/4 finished! Granted I lost some time while I stepped away and the machine had run out of paper, but that wasn't even 30 minutes.
Ouch
Current status: getting started on batch 3 (of 12) booklets. A *massive* order of 1200 units that I'm running in batches of 100—each batch requiring a bit more than 90 minutes to complete!
(The incorrect time remaining counter in this screenshot is inaccurate due to (1) being early in the run, and (2) inability to accurately estimate due to the significant time constantly revising fuser temperature between the matte inside pages and gloss cover page.)
RE: https://mastodon.social/@leebennett/117317847755288923
I should clean up an enlarged three-foot-wide version of this (max width of my wide format printer) and hang it on the big blank wall above my main copier.
Oy. I should’ve known. I gave the customer the benefit of the doubt that they just exported a low resolution PNG instead of PDF from Canva.
No such luck. It came from fracking ChatGPT. 😡
I've said it before, repeatedly…
👏 Canva
👏 does
👏 not
👏 automagically
👏 add
👏 bleed
👏 to
👏 imported
👏 images!
Decided to finally apply official branding to the print shop I manage at my office. I wasn’t sure if I could because I thought the alternate incarnations of our corporate logo were only allowed to be full department names with some allowances for department-specific branding. But I received blessing from our PR director that a primary function within a department could be branded, so I made this logo—following the official corporate branding rules, of course!
Dear print shop customers:
The reason for my $5 minimum for print orders is NOT because I want to collect at least that much from you.
It takes time to receive, preflight, prep, and fulfill any print job, even if it's just 1-2 copies of a poster.
So while I'll fudge the policy a bit and gang up a few different items that arrive within a morning or an afternoon, 2 posters today and a few more next week is two separate instances of doing the prep work. That's $5 each!
YIKES, I always knew my print shop prices for outside institutions were MUCH less than Staples or Office Depot.
But I'm cleaning out an ancient physical Rolodex and found my card back from the 1990s with Kinko's info (even before FedEx took them over).
That old Rolodex card says an 8.5x11 color print (and I noted 1,200 dpi) cost 98¢! *Thirty* years ago!
Not for just anyone, but for plain copy paper, TODAY, I only charge 15¢. (9¢ at cost for internal employees.)
I'm sure @gedeonm will appreciate this.
Every time I replace a toner bottle in my production copier, I imagine I'm replacing an isolinear chip on the Enterprise.
I really need to settle on some keyboard shortcut replacements. Stupid #Adobe isn't consistent.
I use Command-Shift-P in #Acrobat all the time to look at page dimension settings.
But Command-Shift-P in #InDesign adds a new blank page to the document, and I'm ALWAYS hitting that instead.
Page dimension settings for InDesign are accessed via Option-Shift-P instead.
🤦♂️
Nothing quite like teaching yourself how to set up a stack of individual pre-printed sheets to be folded in your production copier bypassing the print engine so it does not incur any ink clicks.
Folks…
Designing (or AI slopping) a flyer for me to print and then placing a flattened image of that design into Canva won't automagically convert the edges for proper ink bleed when printing.
Oh nothing. Just waiting on a tech to arrive and partially disassemble my Canon V1000 production copier to find what I suspect is a pea-sized sliver of ripped paper stuck in a paper drawer, inaccessible to me, and causing jams every time I fire up a job.
How many years now have I been operating this Canon V1000 production copier and only just now learned the heaviest paper I stock (130lb Cover) is supposed to be loaded in the bottom deck tray? Explains why I never was able to select the custom paper type in Fiery Command Workstation.
This is why you shouldn’t ever use AI to design something that includes an established/existing official logo. AI *ALWAYS* changes things a little bit. It simply won’t leave things as-is. I never once yet seen an AI design come to my shop to print that tried to include the Adventist denomination logo that wasn’t altered. And I have a policy of refusing print orders that misrepresent our corporate identity.
My heart hurts sooo bad.
I just had to trash about $650 worth of print product (approx. 2 full cartons of 12×18 paper) because the customer inexplicably approved art, but the event date had changed from last year's save-the-date notice. 9,400 half letter flyers and a couple hundred full letter flyers and tabloid size posters.
I think the worst part for me is it used paper that's already in short supply and we'll have to find an alternate paper to re-run the job.