Desktop Printing with QuarkXPress

Have you ever wondered why, no matter how much time you spend trying to find an option for it in QuarkXPress, you just cannot get that picture to print the way you want it to? And how come that some pictures look more pixelated than others in your layout document?

Sure, you open your picture in Photoshop, or whatever other graphics program you are using, and it looks totally fine! “How are my pictures going to look like once I send them to press?”, is your next question. You want to be able to have print-out from your desktop printer which will more or less show you how your layouts are going to look like.

Be happy, or may be not, because it is not you the one who cannot find the option. The option just does not exist in all the versions of QuarkXPress prior to version 6. You cannot print high resolution images directly from your QuarkXPress to your desktop printer, unless you have QuarkXPress 6.

First of all the reason why some pictures look better than others lies in the format you are using. TIF images usually look better than EPS ones with QuarkXPress because of the way the format itself is structured. I won’t go into details, which you really don’t need to know about, however, whether you save your image as an EPS file or as a TIF file doesn’t really make a difference (if you are talking about a picture and not about a graphic image). The information contained in the files is the same, but because of the way those two formats are, Quark will render them differently. That might make you think that once you go to press, your pictures will look better in one format rather than the other, but that is not true. EPS files take up more space than TIFs therefore there is really no reason why you would be saving your images in EPS format (again, I am not talking about graphics, but about pictures). There are also other reasons, but they are not important at this time. More about these two formats can be found in the article Shall I Use TIFF or EPS Files to Print Bitmap Images?

Going back to how to print layouts with QuarkXPress, if you need to print a proof or you want to see how your images will actually look like, your only option is to make a PDF.

The way you make a PDF differs slightly, depending on the purpose of the PDF. Below are the instructions to make PDFs from QuarkXPress 4.x and 5 for your desktop printer. Note that to be able to make PDFs of any kind you need to have third party applications that can make PDFs, such as, but not only, Acrobat Professional full version (not just the Reader). Here I am using Acrobat 4.0. The procedure described below is only valid for Macs. It won’t change much with PCs, but it is slightly different.

How to make PDFs for your desktop printer.

1) Convert all of your images to RGB. Most desktop printers are made to convert RGB images to CMYK. So if you already have your images in CMYK and then you send them to your desktop printer, your images will look dull. So make sure all your images are RGB (and keep a file of the original image).

2) Go to the Apple Menu>Chooser. Choose the AdobePS. If you have Acrobat Professional, the AdobePS driver should come with it. Otherwise you can download it from Adobe.

3) Only for QuarkXPress 5: Go back to your QuarkXPress document and go to Edit>Preferences. Under Application>PDF choose Distill immediately.

4) Then go File>Print. The Print dialog box will appear. Press the Page Setup button. Another window will appear. Where it says Printer choose Create Adobe PDF. Then press OK.

Enlarged version

5) Go then to Printer. Choose General. Make sure that where it says Destination you have chosen File.

Enlarged version

6) Then choose PostScript Settings. Make sure everything looks like this picture. If you have EPS images, instead of choosing ASCII as Data Format, choose Binary. It is very important that Font Inclusion is set to All, otherwise if you want to give your PDF to someone else, the fonts will not show up and will be substituted with a default font if the other person doesn’t have them.

Choose the PostScript Settings (enlarged version)

7) Then choose PDF Settings. Select Print Optimized as you are only trying to print this document off your desktop printer.

Choose Print Optimized from the job options (enlarged version)

8) Press Save. You will now be asked the name of the file and where to save it. Once you have decided that, press Save again. NOTE: No PDF file has been produced yet. You are only telling your computer where you will be saving your file and how you want to call it.

9) Now you are back to your original Print dialog box of QuarkXPress. Click on the Setup tab. Where it says Printer Description choose Acrobat Distiller.

Choose Acrobat Distiller (enlarged version)

10) Then set your paper size. In this case I have set it as an A4 (an European size which indicates a sheet of paper that is 210 x 297 mm). Set Page Positioning to Center.

Set up the page size (enlarged version)

11) Go to the Output tab. Where it says Print Colors choose Composite RGB. Desktop Printers usually print the best colours when printing RGB graphics.

Choose Composite RGB from the Output tab (enlarged version)

12) Then go the Option tab. Check the option Full Resolution TIFF Output if you have TIFF pictures in your layout, otherwise it does not matter. In the same tab, choose ASCII where it says Data if you don’t have EPS pictures in your layout, otherwise choose Binary.

13) Finally press Print! You will get your PDF file wherever you told QuarkXPress to save it in step 8.

This procedure is only valid for PDFs that will be printed on desktop printers and it doesn’t go into the more complicated options which you don’t really need to know about now. To be honest, even when I make PDFs for press I hardly use many more options, but I set some of the ones we went through just now differently. You cannot give a PDF made this way to your Service Bureau or your outside printer to print it on a press.

In QuarkXPress 6 everything is much easier. You don’t have to make a PDF if you want to print your layout with high resolution pictures. All you have to do is to right-click (or Alt+Click) on your picture and a menu will appear next to you cursor. Go down to Preview Resolution and select Full Resolution. You will be able to view and print your image with its actual resolution. If you are trying to print to your desktop printer you will still need to convert your images to RGB, but it is much simpler with QuarkXPress 6 than it is with QuarkXPress 4.x and 5.