A4 Printing
A4 Printing is considered the industry standard for magazines, catalogues and brochures for a reason. People love the size; it’s a perfect balance that shows the maximum possible content without being too large or unwieldy. For printers like us, we love A4-sized jobs, as they are ideal to produce and offer excellent cost benefits to customers.
Why is A4 so popular in Print?
For most readers and content creators, A4 dimensions are a perfect size for presenting and communicating content. Additionally, in our day-to-day, even for things like our office printers, the A4 format is deemed ideal for printing, writing and reading work documents.
The interesting thing about paper sizes is that they all neatly fold in half and conserve the same aspect ratio – A4 is half the size of A3 and twice the size of A5.
How do we print A4 work?
All our in-house equipment is geared primarily towards portrait A4 print. Most UK web and sheet printers operate what are 16pp presses. This means that each “sheet” printed on these machines consists of 16 A4 pages (pp).
Printers can divide the sheet to print derivatives of 16, i.e., 4 x 4pp or 2 x 8pp, giving customers even more choice for their print.
Where we differ is that we have 32pp presses that can also handle 16pp, 8pp, and 4pp sections giving our customers even more choice.
Because A4 is the most common size, it is much easier and quicker to source the paper in the correct size. Stocks of 870mm and 880mm reels are often in greater abundance, allowing quicker turnarounds and shorter order times, essential for those tight deadlines! If you were to schedule projects with a printer in advance for a magazine, the printer would pre-order materials to be ready just in time for each issue.
If you want to be a little different, then of course, customers are not limited to printing A4-sized jobs.
We are highly skilled in producing bespoke sizes, but you will always get the best overall price and efficiencies by using A4 when only standard reel sizes are available. When a project does not fit within the traditional sizes A4 or A5, we tend to consider it a “special size”. For special-sized jobs, it is often important to book these 8-12 weeks in advance, as it allows the printer to order special-sized reels to reduce costs to the customer and reduce waste from cutting extra paper when using conventional-sized reels.
Where can I find out more about printing?
Well, being on our website already is a fantastic place to start! If you want to know more about the process and dig a little deeper, we have a brilliant Print Beginners Guide and videos on YouTube!
If you have any questions or cant find what you are looking for let our Helpdesk team know!