Methodology and sources

This page exists so that anyone can check where the numbers on this site came from. Print specifications are the kind of information that gets copied between websites until nobody knows the original source and half the figures are years out of date. Everything here is traceable.

Where the figures come from

Every dimension, margin, resolution range and page count rule is taken from the printer's own published artwork guidelines. Not from a blog post, not from a forum answer, not from a competitor's comparison table. Where a printer publishes a figure, we use their figure. Where a printer publishes nothing, the field is left empty and the page says the value is not published, rather than filling the gap with something plausible.

Each specification page links back to the guidelines it came from, and carries the date those guidelines were read. If a printer has revised its specification since that date, the link takes you to the current version.

What is calculated rather than copied

Printers publish trim sizes and margins. They do not always publish the printable area that results, so this site works it out. That calculation is less obvious than it sounds, because a margin does not always apply to all four edges. Newspaper Club asks for a margin at the top, bottom and outside edge of a tabloid page but says nothing about the inside edge at the fold, so the printable width loses one margin while the height loses two. Its traditional broadsheet does specify an inside margin, so that one loses two across the width. The dataset records which edges each format's margin applies to and the arithmetic follows.

Unit conversions are calculated too. Newspaper Club publishes in millimetres and MakeMyNewspaper publishes in inches, and each format records which unit it was originally specified in, so the figure you see in its native unit is the printer's own number rather than a conversion of a conversion.

How the calculations are checked

The build process runs a set of checks against figures the printers published themselves, and refuses to publish the site if any of them fail. MakeMyNewspaper states the printable area of its broadsheet directly as 10 by 21 inches, so our derived figure has to match it. Newspaper Club publishes inch equivalents alongside its millimetre sizes, so our conversions have to match those. There are seven such checks at present, and they exist because a silent arithmetic error in a margin rule would be invisible on the page and expensive for anyone who trusted it.

The calculators themselves are covered by a separate set of tests that run the same way, driving each tool through known inputs and comparing the output against figures worked out independently.

The words per page estimate is different, and labelled as such

Every other number on this site is a printer's specification. The words to pages estimator is not. There is no authoritative figure for how many words fit on a newspaper page, because it depends on the typeface, the column count, the body size and how much of the page goes to pictures.

Rather than publishing a single invented number, that tool builds an estimate from the page geometry and shows every step of the working: column width, characters per line, words per line, lines per column, and the deduction for headlines and images. Two assumptions in that chain are conventions rather than measurements, an average character width of half the point size and an average word length of 5.1 characters including its space. Both are stated on the page so you can judge whether they fit your writing.

What is not covered yet

Only printers whose official guidelines have actually been read are included. The following are named in our plans but are not in the dataset, and the site does not claim to cover them:

They will be added when their published specifications have been read from source, not before.

Corrections

If a figure here does not match what your printer told you, we would rather know. Email hello@newsprintpaper.design with the printer, the format and the figure you were given, and it will be checked against the source and corrected. A specification site that is wrong is worse than no specification site at all.

Independence

This site is not affiliated with any printing company. Nothing here is a paid placement and no printer has any input into what these pages say. Some outgoing links may earn a commission in future, which will be disclosed on the pages carrying them; that will never change which specifications are published or how a format is described, because the entire value of the site depends on the numbers being right.

Whatever this site says, run a test PDF through your printer's own preflight check before placing an order. That check is free, it is run against the file you are actually sending, and it is the only thing that can catch a problem specific to your artwork.