From time to time I am asked, both by salespeople and by production staffers, and even by budget-conscious clients, to prepare a "Guide to Preparing Files for Comp Production." With such a tool in hand our customers could help us shorten production time, increase quality, eliminate re-dos, save themselves money, and enable us all to live a more satisfying and less stressful life. Sounds good, right? The only problem is that while there are a handful of hard-and-fast rules for file preparation, there are millions of "maybes", "soft-ofs", "usuallies", and "theoreticallies", that require an interactive dialog for any meaningful learning to actually occur. Fortunately, Jake (our editor) has asked me to write about file prep in an on–going column in this newsletter. This format, along with a little bit of feedback via email, should allow me to address issues and answer questions in a somewhat dynamic fashion. So, let’s get those hard and fast rules out of the way fast