digital printingDigital printing has opened up lots of ways for ordinary people to put together all sorts of printed materials at half the price or more, compared to offset printing. Since most of the cost associated with offset printing is in the set up fees, it naturally costs more. There are no set up fees with digital printing. Simply prepare your document or art work, save it as a pdf file, and either email it to a printer or bring it there yourself on a CD. It's as simple as that. Well, it sounds simple anyway.

The biggest part of digital printing is getting the document or art work ready for printing. That involves lots of proofreading, editing, rewrites, and formatting that can take weeks, days, or months, in some cases. I'm in the last stages of writing a cookbook, and what appeared to be a simple production is actually quite an effort. While it's not as grueling to write as a dissertation, there are so many formatting issues associated with cookbooks and other documents that have photos and text combined, compared to straight forward texted books. So if you're undertaking something for which you need digital printing, be prepared for little delays toward the end of your production to make it perfect.