Quite a few years ago I interviewed for a job in Tech Support with QuarkXPress, which I was later offered, during which I learned a very interesting thing. It seems the number one reason for a tech support call at that time was because "it won't print". Most of these calls were about being able to print to a desktop printer and so the problem was almost always related to some kind of system problem, like a missing or unselected printer driver. Determining what the problem may be would have been facilitated by having a checklist of necessary steps and possible errors. I say "would have been" because I didn't take the job and so can't speak with authority about how they actually approached this problem.

In the years since, I have worked as a graphic designer and have found that having a "must do" checklist related to printing has been a useful tool. One that I'd like to share with you here. (The following list is geared towards professional printing only, not a simple topic, but I'll attempt to keep it brief.)

Professional Printing

Color Space - Full-color or RGB

Professional printing is done in CMYK or four color process and will not print correctly if you send them RGB files. If your printer catches the error, you may have a chance to fix it yourself or have them fix it ($$$) before it gets printed WRONG. Otherwise, you'll just have to print it again, once it's fixed. In the office this doesn't matter, but for professional printing, this is essential.

Spot colors

These are solid ink colors. There are a lot of reasons why you may want to use a spot color, which I won't go into here, but it's important to know that if your file has a spot color in it and you are printing to CMYK, your spot color won't print right. Solutions exist, like 5-color printing, but know if your file has spot colors in it or not.

Resolution

300 dpi is the required resolution for high-quality printing. With so many images being pulled from the internet (72 dpi), this can be a big problem. Most printers will warn you that your images won't look good, but not always.

Fonts

Off the top of my head, I'd say the biggest problem in printing are fonts. Books are written about the proper use of, and all that can go wrong with fonts, so I'll just say that the basic rule is that fonts either need to be embedded in your file or sent along with your files for the printer to use. A PDF, when written correctly, will have the fonts embedded in it.

Outlines

It's possible to outline fonts in programs like InDesign and Quark, but outlining generally refers to the fonts in supporting files, like Illustrator files that have text in them. To prevent the possibility of a font used in Illustrator, changing to a default font, it's a good idea to convert the text to outlines, which also means converting the text into a graphic. This ensures the characters remain the same as the fonts selected.

Live area

The live area of a printed piece contains essential elements that one wouldn't want to lose by having it chopped off. So Live Area refers to a safe area that is set back from the edge of the designed piece. The amount of setback will be determined by the printing process so talk with your printer and set it accordingly.

Bleeds Open

This refers to when something, a color, image or graphic, extends beyond the edge of the paper. It's an intentional graphic technique and the main thing to keep in mind here is that you must have bleeds "opened up" in your document in order for these to print correctly. If you don't understand this, you'll need to get help.

Spell Check

Remember to do it, especially after last minute changes.

Rich Black

Large areas of solid black will look dull when printed in CMYK unless you use a "rich black". Your printer may have an opinion on what "build" to use for this. If not, I often use 60/40/40/100 or 60% cyan, 40% magenta, 40% yellow and 100% black.

Zip or PDF

Your printer may want to have "native" files. This refers to all the original files for your project meaning fonts, graphics, images and layout document (InDesign or Quark). If you send native files, zip or stuff them before you send them. Or if you burn them to disk, there's no need to do that.

On the other hand, many printers are fine with a high-resolution PDF, provided you know how to create this file correctly.

Spot Color Printing

Up to now, we've been talking about process color printing also known as four-color printing (CMYK), but there are other ways of printing like 1-, 2-, 3-color or more. Most of the things we've talked about previously are also important here. But since we're talking about spot color printing now, there's one thing that's essential to get this right and that's separations. You need to be sure that your file will separate into the correct number of colors and you should be able to test this yourself. If you can't print separations correctly, something may be wrong and you'll need to get some help.