Specifications

Digital printing is an industrial process which offers newspapers at an affordable price. It's quick, flexible and reliable.

Digital printing is perfect for small and medium runs of newspapers.
Our factory is eco-friendly, we use solvent-free inks and recyclable paper.

Newsprint is thin and the maximum ink coverage is limited. The print quality is not as sharp as magazines or photo books.

Your newspaper will look great if you have these guidelines in mind. You can ask for a free sample newspaper and even proof of your own design, so you can get a feel for them.

Newspaper printing is an industrial process. Newspaper printing and finishing lines are very precise.

Tolerances

• Color overlap: ~ 0.2 mm
• Cutting sheets: ~ 1 mm
• Stacking sheets: ~ 1 mm
• Recto/Verso precision: ~ 1 mm
• First fold: ~ 2 mm
• Second fold: ~ 5 mm

High-pagination newspapers are more likely to have a less precise fold because they are thicker.

3x6mm black rectangles are printed at the edge of each page, inside the 10mm technial margin.

These marks are read by a laser sensor that triggers the cutter of the newspaper finishing line. When sheets are all together, they are ejected into a folding machine. Your newspaper is ready!

Here's an example:

Printing resolution is 600dpi. It means that 600 tiny drop of ink (9 picoliter) are printed on each inch of your newspaper.

It may happen that an ink jet head is clogged due to dust or printhead heating.

Our team always purge the printheads before running the press, however a few missing jets can (rarely) occur during printing.

It's hardly discernible on a CMYK image, because other inks will print correctly: missing jets are almost invisible.

Missing jets on grayscale images are more visible because they are printed using black ink only. No other ink will help reduce the missing jet visibility.

Newspaper with a grayscale image (left) and a CMYK image (right):

Tips

• Always use CMYK images. It helps mitigate missing jets.
• For black & white pictures, try to use a CMYK B&W instead of greyscale.

Printheads contain several inkjet modules. Sometimes, a gap of a tenth of a millimeter can occur between two modules. This phenomenon is nearly imperceptible to the naked eye.

We print your newspaper by adding 4 inks: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYK). Each color overlaps on the others, with a precision of a tenth of a millimeter.

In order to get sharp and good looking texts, we recommend using a pure black. Four-color black texts may look blurry.

Use a bold font for white texts over a solid-color background. Thin texts may look blurry.

Four-color black text (top) and pure black text (bottom):

Tips

• Use pure black for all black texts.
• Use a bold font for white texts over a solid-color background.

An inkjet press prints while the paper is moving. Banding can occur as the paper moves under the printheads. It's noticable over large areas of flat color.

Banding is more visible when printing a primary color because only 1 printhead is used. Using a mix of several inks for an area of flat color fades the banding effect. For example, a 100%K flat area is more likely to have banding than a 100%K / 30%C / 30%M / 30%Y four-color black.

Here's an example:

Tips

• Avoid large areas of flat color if you don't want to see any banding.
• If you have large areas of flat color, try to mix different primary colors in order to fade the banding effect.

Your newspaper is printed on a paper roll, and mounted on a finishing line in order to cut, stack and fold the sheets of your newspaper. We don't use staples or glue.

For newspaper with more than 44 pages, some small creases can appear on the central pages. This is due to the thickness of the newspaper.