With the covers taken care of, the text sheets were next. A lot of text sheets. Really.
How many? Well, since you asked:
- Passporto run size: 600
- Number of laser printed leaves per Passporto: 6
- Number of leaves per 8 1/2" x 11" laser printed sheet: 2 (2-Up printing)
- Number of pages to print per sheet: 2 (both sides)
- Pages to print: 3600
That whimper you just heard came from the printer recalling its ordeal.
The decision to print the text sheets on a color laser printer was an easy one to make for a couple of reasons.
First, we have one.
Second, the text sheet designs were far too complex to print letterpress without spending a fortune on plates and doing a lot of press runs. Remember, any time you add a color in letterpress, you have to run all the sheets back through the press.
First, we have one.
Second, the text sheet designs were far too complex to print letterpress without spending a fortune on plates and doing a lot of press runs. Remember, any time you add a color in letterpress, you have to run all the sheets back through the press.
The bad part is the toner.
A set of 4 CMYK toner cartridges goes for about $500, which is more than the printer itself. A typical story in the world of consumer laser printers. We used a little over one full set of toner cartridges to print the text sheets. The cyan cartridge in particular was begging for mercy. |
The sheets were printed 2 Up and we needed artwork. Back to Adobe Illustrator.
First the (relatively) boring visa pages. These are the same on both sides. The picture at right shows the printable artwork overlaid with the final sheet outlines. Getting it all to fit on the printable area of the page took some finessing but it did fit. One factor that made it more challenging is that it pays to print the art a little bigger than the final trim. That way there won't be any unprinted area on the trimmed sheet due to variation in where the printer puts the image on the page. |
You might think we were ready to print at this point. Just fire up Adobe Illustrator, hit print, and the finished pages pour forth.
Nope. It was time to recall a hard lesson learned when making a fauxstage stamp keepsake for the 2022 JoCo Cruise. It turns out that although it's stated nowhere in any documentation, nor in any on-line discussion Google could find* ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR WILL NOT PRINT AT THE MAXIMUM PRINTER RESOLUTION OF 600 DPI NO MATTER WHAT YOU TELL IT TO DO. PERIOD.
Seriously. No print dialog setting, no printer setting, no preference setting, no document setup option. Nothing.
The fauxstage stamps at right show a practical example of what this means. Too bad we didn't figure this out until months after the cruise where we gave out over 3000 stamps of 15 different designs. Anyway, the work around for this is to export the artwork from Illustrator at 600 dpi and then print from Photoshop. Not hard to to once you know you need to do it. Can you tell that this is still seriously annoying, two years on? *After discovering this we learned why it's not discussed. It seems real graphic designers are born knowing "Nobody ever prints natively from Illustrator". |
So, export to Photoshop complete it was time to start feeding sheets. We ran 50 sheets, flipped them over and ran the back side...and once again confirmed that HP's print speed claims are almost as silly as the EPA's mileage ratings for cars. 22 ppm? Yeah, right.
Running 1200+ sheets through the printer twice took a fair amount of time. |
Now for the trickier sheets.
The sides of these are different since they include both the photo page and the title page on opposite sides of the sheet. No drama with the colophon if the title page is in the right place. One of the reasons we did batches of 50 sheets both sides was to minimize the damage if we got the second side the wrong way around. Totally theoretical, honest. We only had to run 600 of these both sides. |
The printing was done! Now we needed to cut the sheets and collate them for binding.