These are additional notes on Adobe Illustrator specific file preparations.

1.0 General Notes

• We can accept files from Adobe Illustrator CS3.
• Please remove any unnecessary colours in your swatches panel.
• Convert all fonts to Outlines when supplying the original file.

2.0 RGB or CMYK?

For general printing just your your normal settings including

• For printing to Card, Paper, PVC, Self Adhesive Vinyl use you normal CMYK document colour space.
• For printing to Fabric and your document contains RGB images then use RGB as your document colour space, but only if you have RGB colours or images in your document.

2.1 Colour Matching for fabric printing

If you require colour matching to Pantone Colours on fabric then for best results we will need to be able to change the colours in the file. If you supply a flattened PDF file we can not change the colours in flattened areas, such as the colour under a drop shadow. In this case please supply either an Unflattened PDF file or the original Illustrator file.

3.0 Transparency

If your document contains Transparency please supply the original file or an unflattened PDF. Instructions are below.

3.1 Scaled Artwork and Flattening

If you are going to supply artwork as a flattened PDF or EPS (without transparency) then please take into consideration the document scale. If your Artwork is 10% full size and you flatten using the default High Resolution flattening preset then the final print will be only 30dpi. To avoid this create a new custom flattener preset as below

If your desired final resolution is 150dpi then

• at 10% scale then get the Gradient and Mesh resolution to 1500dpi (150dpi x 10)
• at 25% scale then get the Gradient and Mesh resolution to 600dpi (150dpi x 4)
• at 50% scale then get the Gradient and Mesh resolution to 300dpi (150dpi x 2) and so on.

3.2 Supplying an un-flattened PDF

Use the save as option in Illustrator and use these PDF settings:

• Saving as Acrobat 8 (PDF 1.7) will preserve the transparency in the document and allow us to match colours accurately on fabric printing.
• Turn off down sampling and use ZIP compression
• Add 10mm bleed
• No colour conversion and embed all profiles