What questions do you ask when interviewing a new prepress operator?

[Joe]

So when I decided to retire they only had one person apply. The only thing they needed to know: Are you breathing?

I kinda find that hard to believe with all the prepress folks not working. If i was to retire, i am sure there would be a flood of applications.

Well we are not in a large city...or even a small city. The job listing was posted in local newspapers and on LinkedIn. The only applicant was through LinkedIn.

[pspdfppdfxhd]

Could he speak english? 

[Joe]

Could he speak english? 

Yes. His previous employment was with a company that we had gotten jobs from before and they had gone out of business. The files we had gotten from them were not great. His work, in the two months I trained him, matched the type of files we had received previously. I hope he has improved since I left.

[DCurry]

Aside from that, I used to have a "file from hell" and would ask them to preflight it.

There wouldn't by chance be a copy of that file just laying around somewhere that you wouldn't mind sharing, is there?

Not sure I still have it, but I'll do some digging when I go home. It had things like a missing font, missing bleed, bad flattening (back when that was a concern), impure black, mismatched 4C blacks, RGB (again, back when that was a problem), lo-res, extra separations.

[bornrd]

RGB (again, back when that was a problem)

Bit off-topic, but what do you mean by that? I still go taught to convert everything to TIFF/CMYK.

So... technically you don't need to do that anymore??

[Joe]

We never manually convert RGB to CMYK. We let the workflow do it. (Prinergy)

[DCurry]

We also let Prinergy handle conversions. Any modern RIP can do it, but it does need to be set up right. Alternatively, you can let InDesign do the conversion as it exports the PDF (again, needs proper settings.)

[madbugger]

Aside from that, I used to have a "file from hell" and would ask them to preflight it.

There wouldn't by chance be a copy of that file just laying around somewhere that you wouldn't mind sharing, is there?

Not sure I still have it, but I'll do some digging when I go home. It had things like a missing font, missing bleed, bad flattening (back when that was a concern), impure black, mismatched 4C blacks, RGB (again, back when that was a problem), lo-res, extra separations.

Cheers, might be an interesting exercise to see what we all can pick up in it.

White type/elements set to overprint are my biggest pet hate

[born2print]

The worst *^$$^&# bobby-trap of them all!

[Joe]

Most modern software will automatically convert white overprints to knockout.

[madbugger]

Most modern software will automatically convert white overprints to knockout.

What universe you living in. Our shop about 4-5 years behind in upgrades 🤬🤬🤬

[DCurry]

The ability of RIPs to fix the white OP issue on the fly has been around for quite a while - longer than 4-5 years for sure. Also, PitStop can detect and fix it pretty painlessly.

[DCurry]

I looked for the test files and can't find them. Sorry!

[Joe]

Most modern software will automatically convert white overprints to knockout.

What universe you living in. Our shop about 4-5 years behind in upgrades 🤬🤬🤬

Retirement Universe these days.

[bornrd]

Most modern software will automatically convert white overprints to knockout.

What universe you living in. Our shop about 4-5 years behind in upgrades 🤬🤬🤬

Retirement Universe these days.

Stop flexin on us will ya