5 Steps to Prepare a Notepad Draft for Printing

Let us get your notepad draft ready for full scale notepad printing. There are five important steps that you will need to know to properly set your draft for printing. I will list down all these steps for you and explain why they matter for notepad printing. Remember each step and of course try to do it for your own color notepads. This will help a lot to improve the end result of your notepad printing.

1. Setting the right size - The first step is to set the right size. You may have been working on a new blank document in your design software without actually setting the right size of the draft for notepad printing. The best way to determine the right dimensions for notepad printing would be to get a notepad template and match its size with your own custom notepads. This will help streamline the processing of your draft, minimizing the need for conversions or extra cuts.

2. Reviewing the background - Afterward, you should then review the background of the notepad draft itself. It must actually “bleed” or cover the whole area in and beyond the margins of the document. This printing bleed allows for the printing inconsistencies that usually happen in full scale notepad printing. So make sure the bleeds are set to at least 1/8 of an inch and of course, try to see if the background is good enough to write on for your notepads.

3. Checking the content - Once the background has been checked, your next step is to check the content. Review if all the lines of text have the right spelling, grammar and style that your custom notepads need. Also check if the formatting of the text, its font style, the size and even the line and character spacing is set properly.

Of course, do not forget if the logos, images and other types of graphics in your drafts are also ready for printing. There should be no distortions, bad colors, bad cropping etc. You will only have one shot at your design before it gets mass produced, so make sure everything is perfect with the content.

4. Test printing - Next, a good way to make sure that your custom notepad drafts are good for printing would be to just test print them. In a lot of cases, people spot the errors in a custom notepad design once they see it actually printed. So by printing your drafts through your own personal printer, you should see if there are more errors that need to be made, or improvements that can be done. Have others checkout the printout as well so that you are sure that no error is missed.

5. Exporting to the right formats - Finally, to fully prepare your drafts for notepad printing, you will want to export the document file to the appropriate formats. Now some notepad printing companies will want precise document files such as a Microsoft Publisher (.pub file) or an InDesign (.indd file). Others can actually make do with a high resolution image file.

To make sure you get the right file format to your printers, it is best to save your document in an array of formats. First save your document in your software's native file format. Then export it as a high resolution BMP or JPG file. Next, zip both of those files together just in case the original files get corrupted when transferred. Give your notepad printer all three types of files to make sure that the printer has all the needed requirements to print your notepad drafts.

Great! Now you know how to prepare a notepad draft for printing. Just review the five steps above and try it out in your process for notepad printing.

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Date Published : Feb 24 2011

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