TCTemplate Help

Instructions for Professional Printers

For the Planner

Professional map printers know how to get the best results out of their equipment. If they need to adjust the colours in the PDF, you should send them your template parameters (.tex), control descriptions PDF, Purple Pen and map (e.g. OCAD) files. Also give them a link to this page. Send them your final PDF too, because it may be good enough for printing anyway and gives the print shop reassurance their output from TCTemplate is correct. Above all, make their life easier by following all of the instructions in TCTemplate before sending the final job to the printer.

For the Print Shop

  1. Adjust any colour settings you normally would in Purple Pen/OCAD/other mapping software ready to produce a course PDF that you would produce in Purple Pen.
  2. Do not adjust the print area/page size settings.
  3. Create a single PDF of all the courses using one of these methods:
    • File->Create PDFs->Courses or your preferred PDF printer from within Purple Pen. Choose to have one copy of each course all in a single PDF. Select all courses, including those not intended to be printed, but not the all controls map. Unless you know better, select CMYK as the colour model.
    • Your preferred software, such as OCAD. Match the print area to that specified in the Purple Pen file with zero margins and the corresponding custom page size. Produce one page for all courses in the Purple Pen file including those not intended to be printed, but not the all controls map. Collate the pages into a single PDF file with the pages in the same order as the courses in the Purple Pen file.
  4. Open TCTemplate.
  5. Upload:
    1. The PDF you just created into the prompt in step 8.
    2. The control descriptions PDF into step 9.
    3. The Purple Pen file into step 10.
    4. The template parameters file into Open station data in step 11.
  6. Click Generate map cards in step 12.
  7. Print A4 pages of the PDF in the quantities and paper specification given by the customer.

If the customer requests laminating/plastic sealing the maps:

  1. Cut along all of the red lines, taking particular care in the boxes on the right hand side.
  2. Laminate/seal the sub-A5 cards.
  3. Cut down to size to ensure the paper within each card is aligned to a uniform position and each plastic card is the same size. Leave a margin of paper-free plastic at the top for hole punching.
  4. Round-off sharp corners on the cards. Do not cut out the notches in the paper on the right hand side. The cards must all be rectangular with four rounded corners.