Hi,
Background - We are a chemical manufacturer that design and print our own/customers labels.
We use two digital Inkjet printers with a UV Cure to print large rolls of labels for our products. The material we print on is usually plastic or paper, which doesn't always leave a perfect finish - sometimes streaky when printing colour boxes.
Recently, we have been experimenting with different materials to improve this. One of the materials that we would like to use is a matte polyprop. When running trial prints, we are getting solid colour boxes, no breaks in the print heads...Perfect....
The only problem we have now is the ink is sometimes bleeding/running off with the font that we use, "Univers Normal", making the text look bolder when it prints. We converted all of the text to c0m0y0k100 to make sure only one ink is going down, the rip file is ripped at 75% to reduce the ink going down yet it doesn't seem to cure the font in time. We even tried slowing down the printer to allow more time for the UV to cure the ink (not ideal as we print thousands of labels daily) but had no success.
Is there a more ideal font that someone could recommend to use with inkjet printers that would help to eliminate this problem?
Thanks in advance.
Rohan
On a material like polyprop, ink does not readily sink in. So its only choice is to spread out -- a process called 'dot gain'.
If lessening the amount of ink applied (within reason) will not correct the problem, then, short of starting with an even thinner (and perhaps wider) version of your font, so that when it spreads out it winds up at the stroke weight you want, there is nothing much to be done. Certainly stay away from condensed fonts as much as possible, as they will close up into little blobs.
Good luck.
--OB
Hello Rohan; If I had that problem I would contact the printer manufacture and tell them what you need to do. I'm sure they will have a list of products to print on with a ink they have tested. There are vinyl's out that have different kinds of coatings for different kinds of printing.
George