Botched printing

[geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA]

 Beth Baxter asked about reformatting her manual to
 accomodate an error printing the manual's cover. Beth, if
 you've got ample white space in the margins, you could
 probably sacrifice a quarter inch on all sides without too
 much hassle: this is, after all, only an eighth of an inch
 on each side, and you probably have this much room to
 spare. So long as you provide crop marks and the printer
 trims appropriately, it shouldn't pose a problem.

 However, this is a rather Procrustean solution. The printer
 is the one who messed up, and who should fix the problem;
 if you let them get away with this, they're very likely to
 be less careful on your work than on everyone else's work,
 and you don't want to establish that precedent. We work
 closely with our printer and let the small stuff go (but
 make sure they know that we know what happened), but we do
 stand firm on the big stuff. We once insisted on recovering
 an entire set of perfect-bound reports because they used
 the wrong cover. (Now _that's_ expensive!)

 It's very likely that the printer simply set the wrong trim
 size on the trimming machine ("Madame Guillotine"), in
 which case they're only out the cost of the paper and a
 small amount of time if you make them reprint. (I suggest
 that very strongly... everyone should be responsible for
 their own mistakes.) Since you mentioned a Docutech
 process, is it safe to assume the cover was done the same
 way? If so, it's even cheaper for the printer, since
 there's no makeready time to speak of, and no negatives to
 reshoot and plates to redo. Even if the cover is
 offset-printed, it's still not a huge expense.

 --Geoff Hart     @8^{)}     geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
 Disclaimer: Speaking for myself, not FERIC.