Skip to main content
/

Resources & Support

/

Layout & Design

Layout & Design

Below are some helpful tips on creating press-quality documents and PDFs. Our Prepress Department is available to assist you if you need any assistance in preparing your files. Please call 732-938-4400 x12.

Mac & PC

  • Preferred Adobe Acrobat Distiller settings for hi-resolution PDF creation

  • GIMP (short for GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a freely distributed open source program for such tasks as photo editing, image composition and image authoring. It may be the closest thing to Photoshop® you can get for free!

  • Gadwin PrintScreen is a freeware utility that can capture the entire Windows screen, the active window or a specified area. The captured screen can be sent to the printer, or saved to disk as a file in six different graphic file formats.

  • Create a press-quality PDF using InDesign

  • Tips on how to create press-ready PageMaker documents

  • Create a press-quality PDF through PageMaker using Acrobat Distiller

  • Preferred Photoshop settings for newsprint

  • A large download directory of plugins for Adobe® (Photoshop®, Illustrator®, InDesign®, Acrobat®) and Apple® (Aperture®, AfterEffect®, FinalCut®) plugins. Includes reviews and user ratings.

  • Create a press-quality PDF using Quark6

  • Browse installed and uninstalled TrueType fonts, view sample text, individual characters and detailed font information all with The Font Thing, the freeware font management utility. It lets you install, uninstall, print, copy or delete any number of fonts at once. You can even store your own notes with them, filter them according to type and group them into collections for convenience.

  • The Print Shop includes all the tools you'll need to create the perfect greeting card, stationary set, calendar, CD label and more. Choose from more than 115,000 photos, graphics and web art. Select from more than 8,000 professionally designed project templates.

  • Art Text from BeLight® is a tool for creating custom logos, icons, headings, and banners. You can modify text and vector shapes, turning them into fancy graphics for your own use and exporting the result in PDF, TIFF, JPEG, GIF or PNG format.

  • FontExplorer X from Linotype® delivers powerful font sorting, font shopping and font discovery capabilities in one easy-to-use font management tool. Best of all, FontExplorer X is free!

  • GIMP (short for GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a freely distributed open source program for such tasks as photo editing, image composition and image authoring. It may be the closest thing to Photoshop® you can get for free!

  • A large download directory of plugins for Adobe® (Photoshop®, Illustrator®, InDesign®, Acrobat®) and Apple® (Aperture®, AfterEffect®, FinalCu®) plugins. Includes reviews and user ratings.

  • Snapz Pro X is a shareware screen capture utility offering a multitude of options and rock-solid performance. You can save captures in a number of popular file formats, such as PNG, GIF, JPEG, TIFF, and PSD. It may be the best screen-capture utility for Mac OS X.

Linux

  • GIMP (short for GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a freely distributed open source program for such tasks as photo editing, image composition and image authoring. It may be the closest thing to Photoshop® you can get for free!

  • gPhoto lets you take a photo from any digital camera and load it onto your computer and then print it, e-mail it, put it on your website, save it to your storage media in popular graphics formats or just simply view it on your monitor.

  • Hamster Font Manager™ (HFM) is a font manager for Linux systems. With it you can control the availability of fonts in all of the supported applications from a central place. Included modules support X-Window, Ghostscript and TeX, as well as PostScript® fonts.

  • Jahshaka is the world's first open source real-time editing and effects application. It takes advantage of the power of OpenGL and OpenML to give its users exceptional levels of performance. It currently supports Linux and Mac OS X. Jahshaka is licensed to the public under the GNU GPL agreement.

  • RenderPark is a photo-realistic rendering tool developed at the Computer Graphics Research Group of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, in Belgium. The program offers many photo-realistic rendering algorithms, including several state-of-the-art rendering algorithms that are not yet present in other packages, not even in expensive commercial ones.

  • Scribus is an open source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, Mac OS X and Windows desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user-friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.