Thanks to our innovative ColorPlus technology, any number of colour pages can be included in any black-and-white book – giving you free choice of placement, full bleeds, and almost any trim size. All this is available at an unbeatable price to boot, starting at nine cents per page.

 

General instructions concerning graphics elements

Graphics are no problem in digital book printing if their quality is good enough in the camera-ready copy.

• Colour illustrations (e.g., photos and drawings) must be integrated with a resolution of at least 200 dpi (better: 300 dpi) and should preferably be saved as TIF files. Illustrations with smaller dpi are not accepted by the system when your camera-ready copy is transferred via myBoD!
• Greyscale illustrations must have a resolution of at least 400 dpi and should preferably be saved as TIF files. Illustrations with smaller dpi are not accepted by the system when your camera-ready copy is transferred via myBoD!
• Line art in bitmap format (suffix *.bmp) – that is to say, illustrations which consist of black lines and contain no greyscales – require a resolution of 600 dpi
• Do not select colour separation if you use professional layout programs, such as InDesign
• Do not use fine hairlines: minimum line thickness is 0.5 pt
• If you want to use a grey background for some surfaces, please select a grey screen with at least 20% black (not lighter). For pie charts and comparable graphics we recommend greyscales of at least 20% to clearly distinguish the gradations from one another
• The screen ruling of illustrations (lpi) should have a ratio to the dpi value of 1:2

Colour design

To ensure that the colours on your screen match the colours ultimately printed in the book as closely as possible, you should follow a few instructions regarding colour management. Digital pictures are generated either by a scanner or a digital camera and are therefore originally in RGB mode. Please leave your illustrations in RGB mode and do not convert your data into CMYK mode. BoD will not convert your camera-ready copy into CMYK mode until right before printing according to the specifications of the equipment used, thus ensuring that your data will be archived independently of the hardware that is employed. Important! If you work with a professional layout program, you should make sure you select the colour profile ECI-RGB for your book data, a colour working space recommended by the European Colour Initiative (ECI). Your can download the profile ECI-RGBv10 free of charge from the ECI website. If your book data have no or a wrong colour profile (such as sRGB), colour deviations in the final printed product cannot be avoided. As a general rule, you can choose between the paper stocks white 90 g, off-white 90 g, and photo glossy 200 g. If your book contains colour pages, we recommend printing on white paper, as the colour rendition is not impacted by the paper colour. The particularly high-grade 200 g photo glossy paper is especially suitable for coffee-table books. Minor colour deviations cannot be excluded in digital printing. Pages which are printed in colour or in black-and-white show a barely visible difference in the text that is printed in black: black text looks fuller and brighter on colour pages.

 

Camera-ready copy for books with colour pages

You must submit camera-ready copy for colour book blocks in digital form as a PostScript or PDF file. This means: you may create your layout using any suitable program, but in the end you have to convert it into a PostScript or PDF file.

If you want to leave the colour layout of your manuscript in professional hands, you can avail yourself of our BoD Layout & Editing service.

 

Placement of graphics elements

Thanks to state-of-the-art digital printing technology, the possibilities for placing graphics elements are nearly unlimited. You can choose full-bleed backgrounds, partial-bleed pictures and column heads, illustrations as full-bleed double-page spreads, or a thumb index cut into the fore-edge.

 

If you want to include illustrations extending to the edge of a page, a bleed of 5 mm must be included. Trim marks must not be typeset, but the PDF file must contain a 5-mm bleed on all sides. A page with the trim size 12 x 19 cm therefore would have the dimensions 13 x 20 cm including the bleed. These specifications are easy to apply with professional typesetting programs, whereas they become very complicated with such word processing programs as Microsoft Word.