How to print a wall calendar
A calendar you design yourself can be printed at home, at a photo lab or at a print shop. Each wants a slightly different file. This guide says which to export from CalDesign for each.
First, ask for the printer's file guide
Every printer publishes what it accepts: the file type, the page size, the bleed, and whether it wants crop marks. Read it before you export. The rest of this guide covers the usual answers.
The terms
- Bleed
- Extra picture beyond the edge of the page, cut off after printing, so a photo that runs to the edge leaves no white line. Most printers ask for 3 to 5 mm on every side. Set it in CalDesign's Layout tab. It is 3 mm unless you change it.
- Crop marks
- Short lines outside the page that show where to cut. Print shops that cut by hand may want them. Online print services usually do not, because their software places the page itself. CalDesign's PDF export has a checkbox for them.
- Resolution
- How many pixels of a photo fall on each inch of paper. 300 is the usual target. CalDesign warns you before export when a photo has too few pixels for its size on the page.
At home
Export a PDF without crop marks and print it at 100 % (not "fit to page"). Most home printers cannot print to the edge of the sheet, so choose A4 or Letter, the size of your paper, and expect a thin white border. Heavy matte photo paper of about 200 g/m² works well for a wall calendar.
At a photo lab
Photo labs print photos, so they usually take one image per page. Export the pages as JPEG or TIFF at 300 dpi, with the bleed if the lab asks for it. Labs work in RGB, as CalDesign does, so the colours need no conversion. A 16-bit TIFF keeps the most detail in skies and shadows.
At an online print service
Services that print and bind wall calendars on order mostly want one PDF of the exact product size, with their own bleed (often 3 or 4 mm) and no crop marks. Some want one PDF per page, or blank pages in set places: check their guide. Set the page size to theirs in millimetres before you design, so nothing has to be scaled later.
At a print shop
A shop that prints on an offset press may ask for CMYK files and PDF/X. CalDesign exports RGB PDFs today. Ask whether the shop converts RGB files itself (some do), and ask for a proof print before the whole run.
Binding
Wall calendars are usually bound with a wire along the top. Keep text and faces 12 mm or more away from that edge, since the holes go through it.