More and more print shops do a “digital proof” instead of a real physical proof copy like you’d get in the olden times.
In other words, you send them a pdf of the thing you want printed, and they send you the pdf back.
What is this ritual intended to accomplish?
In: 5
You can simulate what will come out of a specific printer. Not perfectly, but well enough to at least catch moderate to large issues that the customer might want to have adjusted before printing. The PDF you receive is the result of that “simulation” – it’s not just the PDF you delivered (at least it shouldn’t be).
E.g. one big factor is color spaces and converting between them. A printer has a certain range of colors it can produce. If you used colors outside that range in your document, the result will look different from what you intended. Also, the colors in your document were encoded in a certain color space, and this will need to be converted to the color space used by the printer, and this conversion can change the exact appearance of certain colors (especially if the conversion isn’t done correctly for whatever reason, e.g. because your document didn’t include a specification of the color profile you used). Still, the digital proof will only ever be an approximation of the resulting colors, especially if you’re not viewing the document on a color-calibrated screen.
For higher-stakes printing, a physical proof print is still the gold standard.
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