Document File Types

If you are preparing your own artwork, and are planning to send it to us, please ensure the file you send is one that we can work with or open.  To be honest, we can usually find a way of a using whatever file we receive but sometimes we bump into a problem and have to find a way to work around it.

On a daily basis, we use QuarkXpress and Adobe InDesign for our artwork, and also make quite considerable use of programs such as Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. If you are working with these programs for your artwork that’s terrific from our point of view, but what if you are using Microsoft Publisher, or Word (or even Excel believe it or not), or something weird and wonderful that nobody but you has ever heard of, but that you really like to use?

Most desktop publishing programs are completely independent of each other, meaning that you cannot open MS Publisher files in QuarkXpress for example. But most of them also have some sort of facility to produce PDFs, which is one way to solve the problem. Having said that, it is true to say that, on very rare occasions, we get files which we can do absolutely nothing with, invariably because the artwork has been created using a program which was never designed to do the job and that no professional printer could use.

However with a little bit of forward planning, and perhaps a conversation with us, it is usually possible to solve any problems that might arise, and probably avoid them altogether

Software we use regularly:

We work with a wide range of software, and can usually handle any type of file. For more information please also see our Picture File Types Guide.