Prepress

Prepress is the term used in the printing and publishing industries for the processes and procedures that occur between the creation of a print layout and the final printing. The prepress procedure includes the manufacture of a printing plate, image carrier or form, ready for mounting on a printing press, as well as the adjustment of images and texts or the creation of a high-quality print file. In today's prepress shop, the form of delivery from the customer is usually electronic, either a PDF or application files created from such programs as Scribus, Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress.

The following items have each been considered part of prepress at one time or another:

In most modern publishing environments, the tasks related to content generation and refinement are carried out separately from other prepress tasks, and are commonly characterized as part of graphic design. Some companies combine the roles of graphic design and prepress production into desktop publishing usually called DTP.

The set of procedures used in any particular prepress environment is known as a workflow. Workflows vary, depending on the printing process (e.g., letterpress, offset, digital printing, screen printing), the final product (books, newspapers, product packaging), and the implementation of specific prepress technologies. For example, it is not uncommon to use a computer and image-setter to generate film which is then stripped and used to expose the plate in a vacuum frame; this workflow is hybrid because separation and halftoning are carried out via digital processes while the exposure of the plate is an analog one. That demonstrates that the borders around the prepress are very fluid. Furthermore, – depending on the printing method and the print product – the elements of the prepress of a graphic print production can differ from case to case. This circumstance requires a management of the workflow. It is necessary to manage the responsibility for each part of the workflow. That can mean that employees, who are actually responsible for other parts of the production (e.g. Layout), have to attend to parts of the prepress.

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