[6809] in APO Printshop
Re: General Inquiry - Printing Invitations
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joseph Kesselman)
Wed Dec 3 01:01:59 2014
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 01:01:53 -0500
From: Joseph Kesselman <keshlam.cat.nospam@verizon.net>
Cc: apo-printshop@mit.edu
In-reply-to: <alpine.DEB.2.10.1412022258050.11589@buzzword-bingo.mit.edu>
On 12/2/2014 11:06 PM, Leonard H Tower Jr. wrote:
> Even if there are no fine lines,
> I doubt we can get even impression off a plate that size.
Len *may* be being overcautious.
A 5x7 card is not necessarily a 5x7-plus-bleed plate. Border would bring
it down; text (if not printed over/within the plate) might bring it down
farther. (Actually, I'm not sure how to print a bleed-over-on-all-sides
plate on our press without printing oversized paper and then trimming.)
There's also the question, as Len pointed out, of how much detail is in
the plates these folks want to use. If it's on the order of an ivy
border, I don't see that as being overly difficult even if one has to do
micro-adjustments to bedding, run all three rollers, and be
extra-careful with inking. If it's something that requires wide areas of
ink, halftones, and so on it gets more difficult. (CF the challenge of
keeping an entire page of text balanced between under- and over-inked.
But "if it happened, it ought to be possible.")
We do have some large plates in the shop -- the two-part certificate for
example, border and sunrise. When I was running the cuts catalog I
didn't attempt to fine-tune the printing thereof so the sample is pretty
sloppy, just enough to show what it is -- and I don't know whether it's
damaged at this point. We also have some fine-detail plates which
approach that size, eg the halftoned photos.
If someone wanted to spend some time experimenting with what we have on
hand, we could get a better idea of what the press is and isn't
currently capable of.
So depending on what they actually want, when they want it, and how much
time we have to evaluate, this may or may not be out of our current
scope. If folks are interested, I'd favor responding "maybe" and getting
more specifics about both the job and the state of the press before
deciding yea or nay.
-- Keshlam (who has so far failed to make himself more available, so you
may want to take his blatherings with an appropriate block of salt)
