Christmas Card Printing

We are about to send out our Christmas cards. I’ll try not to spoil anything here for those of you on our list.

We get them printed at a nearby printing/copying center (PCC). Last year, I had our Christmas cards printed by the PCC and they were fine. But we ran out, so I had to go back. I did not get the same employee at the PCC, and he did not do as good a job as the first one did. Here’s what happened then.

I produced the card as an image file (JPG, in case you’re wondering). I made it large enough that the resolution would be good when printed on a normal sheet of paper (8.5×11″). When the second PCC person loaded the files, he remarked how large my file was – “You have it set to be over 2 feet wide!”. He then informed me that he fixed it to fit on the size I wanted. He printed a test sheet and held it up. It looked good so we ran all the copies.

When I got home later and looked at the copies at a normal distance, instead of a dozen feet away, I noticed that the images were blocky/pixelated. I then realized what happened – he had his resolution set at 200 DPI instead of the 600 DPI I wanted. That made my image larger than expected. And rather that increase his DPI, taking advantage of the file size to produce a good resolution, he just reduced my file to a bad resolution.

Now fast forward to this year. I took my files to the PCC, one file for the front of the card and one files for the back of the card, just like last year. Determined not to make the same mistake again, I asked for the test sheet so I could make sure they didn’t mess up the resolution. They got the resolution right, so I was happy and gave them the okay to print the rest. I paid and left.

Then I remembered to check the orientation of the front against the back. To my chagrin, I discovered that the back was printed upside down. It would not have been hard to tell with the test sheet, but I was thinking only of the resolution and forgot about how it would look when folded.

So, if you receive our card this year and you think the card is upside down when you open it, you’re right. Just pretend the front of the card is the back and vice-versa and it’ll work out.

It stood on twelve oxen, three facing the north, three facing west, three facing south and three facing east; and the sea was set on top of them and all their hindquarters turned inwards.

2 Chronicles 4:4

Digg Del.icio.us Reddit Stumble Upon

This little article thingy was written by Some Guy sometime around 6:46 am and has been carefully placed in the Mishaps category.

Leave a Reply

Comment moderation: please do not submit your comment multiple times, as comments are not posted until I approve them. If your comment never appears, that probably means that I didn't like your comment (maybe off topic, maybe spam, maybe not family-friendly, etc.).