How and Why to Clean Up Your Layout

A clean digital file is one that will print troublefree and isn't full of unnecessary items such as unused fonts and colors and stray items on the pasteboard. It's also a file that you can hand off to someone else and not have to sit by their side to explain what's going on with colors, graphics, layers, and oddball spacing.

In The Digital Dish: Best Practices for Page Layouts Sandee Cohen describes some things you can do to create a neat and tidy digital file. A few of these I've talked about in more detail such as:

• Don't hit the Return key to add space between paragraphs.
  Sandee tells us, "double returns can cause spaces if they fall at the tops of columns." Learn more about why professional typesetters, designers, and desktop publishers should use paragraph formatting to put space between paragraphs.

• Use style sheets.
  Style sheets not only make it easier to apply and change formatting throughout a document, when you have to share files with others standardized style sheets help to maintain consistency. Learn more about how using style sheets in desktop publishing can make life easier and make page layouts more trouble-free.

Do you put these Best Practices for Page Layouts at creativepro.com to use in your digital files?

More: Using Page Layout Software