newsprintpaper.design is a small, free reference for people preparing files for custom newspaper printing. It does one thing: it tells you the numbers you need before you start designing, and it shows you where those numbers came from.
Why it exists
Printing a custom newspaper is an unusual print job and almost nothing you know from other print work transfers. The page sizes are not standard and differ between companies. Bleed, which nearly every other printer requires, is refused here. Page counts have to fall on multiples because of how sheets fold. Image resolution rules are looser than for glossy work because newsprint cannot hold the detail anyway. Every one of those is a trap for somebody arriving from ordinary design work.
The information does exist. It is in each printer's artwork guidelines, spread across several support pages and PDF downloads, in different units, using different words for the same thing. Finding it is not difficult so much as tedious, and comparing two printers means doing the tedious part twice. This site collects it, puts it in one shape, and adds calculators for the parts that need arithmetic.
What it does not do
It does not print anything, sell anything or take your files. It is not affiliated with any printing company. It does not have an opinion about which printer you should use, beyond describing what each format is good and bad at.
It also does not guess. Where a printer publishes a figure, that figure is used and linked. Where a printer publishes nothing, the page says so rather than filling the gap. The one estimate on the site, words per page, is labelled as an estimate and shows its entire working.
How it is built
Every calculator runs in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, no account is needed, and if you paste a draft into the words estimator that text never leaves your computer. There is no tracking of what you calculate because none of it reaches us.
The specifications live in a single dataset that both the pages and the calculators read from, so a printer changing its guidelines is one edit rather than twenty. That dataset is checked on every build against figures the printers published themselves, and the site will not build if a check fails. The methodology page explains all of this in detail.
Getting in touch
If a figure here is wrong, or your printer told you something different, please say so. Email hello@newsprintpaper.design. Corrections are the most useful thing anyone can send.