Free trade guides
The Print Shop's Guide to AI Prepress
Everything here was learned inside a working Minuteman Press and baked into our engine. No fluff, no stock photos of handshakes — the actual rules, math, and rituals of files that print right.
RGB, fonts, bleed, hairlines, soft images, overprint, wrong sizes — and the real fix for each.
The fit math, gutters and margins, crop mark conventions, and why utilization is the money number.
The pairing rule, multiples of four, creep compensation, and digital vs offset plating styles.
Cutter tolerance, safety margins, and the edge-mirroring technique that saves customer files.
The exceed-6.125" flat rule, why 6.25×9 is the standard, and the paperwork that gets reorders.
The six facts every ticket needs — for a new hire or an AI. The good ones are identical.
Plateroom does everything in this guide automatically. Drop the file, type the job like a work order, download the plates. First 20 jobs free.
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