How should electronic files be sent to Carleton Graphics for text,
photos, ads, and other items for the "front matter" of the directory?
Carleton Graphics currently supports the following text document file types:
- ASCII
- EBCDIC
- Microsoft Word 2.0 or later
- Pagemaker 6 or 6.5
- Indesign 2.0
- QuarkXPress 3, 4, 5, and 6
- RTF
- UTF-8
- WordPerfect 4.0 or later
- PDF *
Please note that fonts and formatting may be lost from formatted text documents.
If fonts must be preserved, please send us Pagemaker, QuarkXPress, or Word documents
for Macintosh and include the Macintosh fonts along with the documents. Always include
a hard-copy printout so we can be sure how a document is expected to look.
* PDF -- Importability will depend upon the structure of the PDF file. We will try!
We currently support the following image file types:
- Adobe Photoshop (Macintosh)
- BMP (Windows bitmap)
- CLP (Windows Clipboard bitmap)
- EMF (Windows enhanced metafile)
- EPS (Image only, Adobe)
- GIF (Any platform)
- JPG / JPEG (Any platform)
- PCX (ZSoft Paintbrush)
- PIC / PICT (Macintosh Picture)
- PNG (Portable Network Graphics)
- TIF / TIFF (Tagged Image File Format)
- WMF (Windows metafile)
- WPG (WordPerfect Graphic)
Additional file types may be possible for us to import. You can send us samples to try.
Files smaller than 10 Mb can be sent as email attachments, though we recommend using a
compression utility (Stuffit on Macintosh or PkZip/FreeZip/WinZip on Windows) to compress
text documents first and send us the compressed archive rather than the original document
file. Bitmap images (BMP, TIF, etc.) can be sent as-is without compression, as they usually
will not compress well with Stuffit or a Zip utility anyway.
Files larger than 10 Mb can be sent on CD-R (up to 700 Mb), Zip disks (up to 250 Mb),
or Jaz disks (up to 2 Gb).
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What is the difference between the four color process and
spot color printing methods?
Four color process printing uses exactly four standard color inks for
printing -- cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. These four standard colors are
commonly called "CMYK" for Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, and
BlacK. (Note that K represents black
because B usually means Blue
in the color printing business.) Typically a full color original photograph,
drawing, or other art work is used to generate four separate printing plates, one for
each of the four standard process colors, which are printed sequentially on the paper.
The final resulting image on the paper is composed of myriad microscopic dots -- some
of each of the four process colors. These tiny colored ink dots have varying sizes and
spacings between them so that they blend optically to produce, within the eye and brain of the
viewer, a good approximation of the original full color image using only the four standard
process ink colors. Four color process printing is suitable and relatively economical for
reproducing most color photographs and other color art work that uses a broad range of
different hues.
Spot color printing uses any number of specific colored
inks (rather than only the four standard CMYK inks described above) to match exactly
each individual hue specified by the designer of a piece of art. Spot color is highly
precise and is often preferred when it is necessary to match and reproduce exactly a
few specified flat color areas in the art work. Suppose, for example, that
you've got an ad containing some black text and line art with a color logo that uses
two very specific colors -- a burnt orange and a brilliant royal blue. One plate could
be created for the text and line art, and then a plate for each of the two specified
"spot" colors used in the logo.
To attempt to use the spot color method to reproduce an image containing a great
many different hues (such as found in most color photographs) would require using a
great many different specific color inks -- one for each specific hue -- and creating
a separate plate for each one of them. This could be prohibitively expensive.
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Where is Carleton Graphics located?
We are in
South Bend, Indiana,
in the Heartland of the United States of America!
South Bend is so named because it marks the southern-most bend of the St. Joseph
River. This beautiful river has its source in Central Lower Michigan, loops down into
Northern Indiana to South Bend, and then turns back northward where it finally flows
into Lake Michigan between the Twin Cities of St. Joseph and Benton Harbor in Michigan.
Our local region which includes North Central Indiana and Southwest Lower Michigan is called
"Michiana" by the folks around here. We have a growing, diverse,
multi-ethnic population and many active industries including metal fabrication, recreatitonal
vehicles, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and agriculture. There's even a spearmint farm
southwest of town.
Our climate is temperate, and our winters are often characterized by lake effect snow
because we're about 20 miles (as the snow flies) from Lake Michigan.
Nearby Indiana towns include Mishawaka, Granger, Osceola, Elkhart, Goshen,
North Liberty, LaPorte, and Plymouth. Our neighbors to the north include Niles, Buchanan,
Berrien Springs, Cassopolis, and Dowagiac in Michigan.
Higher education abounds in Michiana. We are proud to count among our neighbors
