Copyright 1997-2002, Virginia Lawrence

If you plan to send laser printout to the printing house, your printout should be high-resolution printout. That’s because the printer will take your pages and photograph them to create the film for printing. Since the film is a copy of your pages, the film and the resulting printed pages will have a slightly lower resolution than your original pages. The final printed book will always have a lower resolution than your original pages, so it’s best to start the process with the highest possible resolution.

What do we mean by resolution as applied to laser output? Resolution is measured in dots per inch. The greater the number of dots per inch, the higher the resolution.

Today, on a reasonable budget, you can produce laser printout in one of two resolutions:

600 dots per inch (dpi)
1200 dots per inch (dpi)

The price increases with the resolution. However, now in 2002, the 1200 dpi laser printers which create beautiful output, are available at amazingly low prices. So you can use an inexpensive laser printer and produce camera-ready copy for the printing house. However, it's always better to send electronic files to the printing house. When you send electronic files, you will get a book of resolution at least equal to 1200 dpi. Depending on the processes used by the printing house, the rsolution may be much higher than 1200 dpi.

Why is resolution important? Well, even an untrained eye can see the obviously lower quality of a book printed from camera-ready copy when comparing it to a higher resolution book. Although 600 dpi laser printout submissions were common until recently, now we can produce higher resolution economically, and readers expect higher resolution.

These days, even the smaller software companies and independent book publishers are submitting their books to the printing house in electronic files.

Electronic Files to Printing House

Self-publishing