What image and disk formats are used in professional publishing?
For CMYK bitmapped images, the most common format used by printers is 32-bit TIFF. Most service organizations or printers ask that TIFF files be sent uncompressed. This seems to be more of a superstition than a real technical problem with the compressed TIFF format, but disk space is cheap enough to humor them. For vector images or page layouts, Illustrator, Pagemaker, and Quark formats are all accepted. I don’t know about Freehand format. When sending a page or pages in one of these formats, you need to make sure that all of the raster graphics are present, as well as all of the fonts for your page. Be sure to ask your printer what they accept, and make sure you follow their directions for preparing the files, such as page size, number of pages per file, bleed specifications, image resolutions, and other program settings. Some printers will not accept improperly-prepared images, or will charge you to fix your errors, usually at a extravagent graphic design rate of $25-$50 an hour. The
