Production Formats

hey steelshark,

i can't tell you the exact answer for board games, but i know that a lot of printing stuff is done via .pdf nowadays. I personally don't like it but it's versatile and relatively convenient i guess.

.psd may well be acceptable. Another possibility is .eps or .ai (Illustrator file) but this kindof depends on whether you did much layout/text in vector or not.

again for dpi i don't know about board games specifically but in general 300dpi is ok for print stuff. However, it does go up to 600 for really high quality glossy photos (for example what a luxury car brochure might have, you know those classy studio shots?).

PDF is the most standard solution these days, but there are many flavours of PDF (for different uses). You should provide a high resolution, CMYK, embedded fonts PDF if you're going to work with a professional offset printer.

Since you already have your cards layed out in Word, it might be a worthy choice to try to produce the PDF from there, but I wouldn't be too optimistic about that path. Word can produce PDFs (any program with the capability to print can, using the proper printer driver), but MS products tend to produce clumsy PostScript files, hence problematic PDFs.

If the Photoshop files you mention have the appropiate resolution, and you only used Word to lay them side by side, it shouldn't be a problem to redo the laying out using a more professional aplication. I bet your Word file is layed out in Letter or Legal sized paper, and it's not likely that a professional printer would print such small sized sheets, specially if you have many cards. So it's very likely that you'll need to redo the laying out anyway.

If you have more than just the laying out of the cards done in word (like the cards' texts, etc.), you might try producing a PS file from there, then import that into an illustration utility like Corel or Illustrator. That would save you from having to type it all over again. That's if you are happy with the design you have in Word and don't want to redo it.

As for resolution, as Braincog mentioned, 300dpi is just fine. 600 is excesive, it will only increase the weight to the file four times and, unless you're using a 300lpi halftone screen (which is quite unlikely) will give you a more blury image than a 300dpi (BTW, the right unit for images is ppi, not dpi, but dpi, a measure unit for printers and filmmakers, is the term is most people uses).

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