Digital Binding Tips

Digital printing is becoming increasingly popular for smaller print runs. The quality and turn-around time for your digital job can be affected by the way you supply it to us, so the following guidelines have been prepared to help you get the best out of your digital printing job.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call us on 0208 961 1750 to discuss your specific requirements.

Perfect Binding

Jobs should be supplied printed in page order as a bookblock.

To ensure delivery on time, please supply a small number of tex 'overs' and some extra covers. If a problem occurs, we can often rebind the text.

To control the costs, please put a colour divider between books.

Jobs can be printed with as many images to view to take up the full sheet size. (see note below about gutters)

Digital Paper is very solid so try to use the lowest grammage possible for the text. If heavier paper is used, it is harder to open the book.

Please keep trim marks to a minimum. During digital printing, there is often a degree of movement so that the trim marks close to the edge may be left on during trimming. In this situation, we may have to cut the job undersize.

Try to line up the cover with the grain. Failure to do so means we cannot put full pressure on the crease which takes away from the overall strength of the book and, occasionally, the cover will crack.

We will include a 6mm hinge crease as standard, so please consider that you will lose 6mm of print area on the inside cover and on the first and last pages of text.

Please leave a 6mm minimum gutter between pages. If there are no gutters, you will lose approximately 2mm from 3 edges.

Try to allow bleed on the edges of the print. Any movement on the print will result in an undersize on the book and could possibly cut into other pages, text, or images.

Stitching

For the best quality finish, please supply your job as separate pages with all of the same page number kept together (if collated see note below).

Jobs supplied as single sheets can then be folded and run on one of the stitching lines ensuring a flatter finish.

If you have printed on oversize sheets, try to leave a high folio lip (i.e. print off centre).

If a job is supplied in collated sections, we will need to hand-fold the sections or put them through a booklet-maker. This usually creates a finished book that is very springy.

For a thicker booklet, consider having it Perfect Bound for a better finished product (this may actually be cheaper than you think).

Thread Sewing

If a book is to be thread sewn, it must be carefully planned.

Each printed spread should be supplied separately so that it can be folded individually (i.e. do not supply as a booklet).

Regardless of size, each section should consist of no more than a 16pp section.

Please supply a number of 'overs' as Thread Sewing involves a number of process steps and this can result in minor problems.

NOTE - 4pp sections cannot be sewn as single sections as they will tear and jam the sewing machines.