#talesfromtheprintshop — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #talesfromtheprintshop, aggregated by home.social.
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I sit on three different committees as part of my job. One of them generally only meets once a month for only 5-6 consecutive months. The other two roughly quarterly.
Somehow *all three* got scheduled this same week which has heavily mucked up my already busy workload, compounded by one large print job I initially hoped would only need 7–8 hours to complete but is turning out to knock out ALL of yesterday and apparently more than half of today.
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Wow! Just learned a new trick!
Large 60×40 inch art file to print spanned across three 13×37 sheets—each to be mounted in a frame.
Thought I'd have to make 3 copies of the art, crop down to 13×37, and carefully move within the crop to align next to each other.
MUCH better way: #InDesign can place multiple pages side by side! So just one copy of the art filling all three pages, tweak crop to desired position, then export a PDF of the pages automatically aligned!
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The bad news was, they did it again, even worse. Instead of end of day Wednesday, program booklets for the Spanish version of our annual convocation this weekend arrived at 10 AM Thursday.
More bad news was that I had to be out of the office a little more than 2 hours across lunch for appointments.
The good news was the Spanish booklets were 12 pages instead of 16—25% fewer pages which roughly meant 25% less run time in the copier.
Yes. Got them done.
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Oh nothing, just starting out my workday with a handful of untenable customer requests.
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Scotty had a firm mantra for telling Captain Kirk how long it would take for engineering to complete a task.
I have failed at following his advice, and I now find myself being asked to print an enormous job tomorrow instead of several days lead time—and it is needed for distribution Friday.
Yes, I can do it, but it cuts into the schedule I was trying to maintain for other preparations of this big annual event. And leaves zero wiggle room if copier goes down.
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Keeping track of things in Excel can sometimes be weird, but hey, if it works for you, then I call it a success.
#ThisCallsForASpreadsheet #BusyAtWork #TalesFromThePrintShop
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I have, by absolutely all possible accounts, earned my salary today.
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Ah yes, the never ending saga of customers who simply cannot comprehend the proportions of half letter and full letter don’t match; full letter and European A4 don’t match; and space for ink bleed doesn’t just magically create itself.
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Update to the Easter event cards—another related group submitted a different 6×4 card, also 2,500 quantity, also wanting them ASAP today. *And* while that was running, an order came in for 1,000 double-sided copies of a map/guide sheet for the event!
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Current status: resisting actually acting on the urge to knock some heads.
Huge annual public Easter event this weekend. Organizing church wanted 2,500 6×4 cards to distribute. Art was supposedly to be ready last week—wasn't submitted until late yesterday with the inquiry whether they could be ready for volunteers to start inserting into baggies THIS MORNING!
Told them they'd be lucky if I can even get the whole job printed and cut by end of today!
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Ay yi yi - today's exponentially higher-than-usual prolificacy of blaring mistakes in people's print orders is going to be the end of me.
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Dear external print shop customers: there's an explicit reason I enforce a $5 minimum charge for orders. Sorry, but no, I will not tally a handful of one- or two-dollar orders across a couple weeks to eventually meet that minimum.
Truly, that minimum reflects the time and effort to log in an order and prepare it for print. Defeats the purpose if I have to make that effort several times without compensation.
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@leebennett/116286013388981174
Well nice - in the space of the end of yesterday and just an hour and a half this morning, I've plowed through about half the work already! #TalesFromThePrintShop
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Jinkies! Nothing like nearly a dozen rapid-fire print order submissions from six different customers within less than an hour.
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Customer tried to convey desired dimensions of something for me to print. Kept typing out things like 4.1/2x3, and I'm looking at it perplexed, like, "okay, 2x3 but what is the 4.1 part?"
Turns Out™ they were trying to tell me 4.5 x 3 (aka 4½ x 3).
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I just learned this is actually a thing—not only that it *was* a thing, but still *is* a thing.
Maybe next time I tell you I won’t print your order because it’s clearly marked with a copyright notice prohibiting reproduction and you don’t have written authorization to copy it, I should mention my Canon machines most likely still do this.
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OOHH!!!
I am SUCH a HAPPY CHAPPIE!!!!!
The nifty Fiery Go app I use on my phone to check the status of jobs running on my production copiers has an iPad version.
I have zero need for the app on my iPad which is seldom at work with me. BUT…I just remembered iPad apps will usually run on Macs with Silicon CPUs (M1, M2, etc.) if the developer activated it.
So I now have an awesome compact monitor instead of needing the full screen Fiery Command Workstation app!
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So here's a Thing™ I just had to do:
I have a bunch of macOS aliases in my ~/Library/Favorites/ folder and a couple on my Desktop that point to various locations on my office's SMB-mounted network volume for quick access in convenient locations.
Eventually, it's going away and everything will move to OneDrive. So I'll get to re-map every one of those aliases to whatever new path OneDrive will create.
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If a customer submits a job in the default generic 8½x11 photocopy product, commercial shops might just run it anyway and maybe even willing to redo it when the customer reveals they were expecting 5x7 cards but didn’t use the postcard product.
I noted the art was only 5x7 and texted the customer not wanting to have to charge them twice since my markup doesn’t have room to eat a redo. Customer might think it’s nitpicking but I’ll get the order correct the first time.
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Ugh, the audacity of commercial/production copier vendors cold-calling to solicit.
In this business, you already know we're usually on multi-year contracts. You also already know many companies are long-established with their existing vendors—just as I am extremely happy with mine.
A cold solicitation call is not going to entice me to just jump ship.
And stop acting put out when I refuse to tell you how long my contract lasts so you can solicit me again at that time.
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To the developers of the web portal I use for print order submissions and billing…
THANK YOU for having the foresight to program automatic rejection of a command to digitally shred credit card info on orders with preauthorized amounts but haven't yet been posted for charging!
I would otherwise have goofed, and I'm not sure I'd have been able to persuade this particular customer to let me re-run their card!
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Turns Out™
The broken piece was completely unrelated and had probably been sitting there ever since this new machine's install was completed. Tech never found any other explanation for the ghost paper jam detection, but managed to clear whatever was prompting the error.
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Arrived to work this morning with the primary copier nonfunctional, even though it worked fine yesterday.
Claimed a paper jam but there's no paper to be found.
However, found a plastic piece (approximately 2×3½ inches in size) laying in the bottom of the saddle fold/stitch unit. Both of the little clips of some sort appear broken. Seems like whatever this is, it might be important.
Tech is en route.
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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.
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Please remember that while Canva.com is infinitely better than Publisher ever is or was, it's still not without its own headaches.
The image on the left is how a job submitted to me is supposed to look. Indeed, Acrobat renders it correctly when opened.
BUT: on the right, Apple Quick Look reveals the same way a Fiery print engine renders it—custom gradients ignoring the letter shapes as a mask.
Always ask your print professional to flatten your PDFs before printing.
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Yeah. Sure. Go ahead and ask me to print 150 copies of a flyer with a YouTube URL that you typeset using a font that only has upper case letters.
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Searching for an alternative prompted me to calculate a number I never really knew for certain—I print on average more than 4,000 12×18 sheets a month!
I came to that number by looking up that I bought an entire pallet of 32 cases (1,250 sheets per case) August 2023, May 2024, and March 2025—40,000 sheets every 9–10 months!
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Spine crack and #workaround
In spite of telling a customer we don't have scoring equipment and any #ink that isn't a super light shade would #crack, they wanted to see it. Upon agreeing it's bad, I thought of a possible #solution by intentionally creating a white line down the #spine #fold. Customer was happy. And I am happy that I can show this photo to future customers instead of printing a sample I know they won't like.
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The MOST popular paper BY FAR in my print shop is a Hammermill 60lb Bright White Cover weight. I stock various sizes, but 12×18 is most common, allowing 11×17 posters or two-up 8½×11 with bleed.
During Covid, it got REALLY hard to find. Lately it's been fine but is now scarce again. One vendor speculates discontinuation and YIKES I hope not!!
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Ooooooo I just coined a perfect term for this process of hiding when the ink cracks down the spine when a booklet is folded:
Spine Crack Abatement!