Commercial Printing
Catalogue printing at Renjie covers product catalogues, rights catalogues and lookbooks from 8 to 240 pages — perfect bound, saddle stitched or wire-o, printed offset on colour-managed Roland presses. From 500 copies.
Standard Specifications
Page count decides the binding. Up to about 64 pages a saddle-stitched catalogue is cheaper and opens flat at the middle; beyond that the spine bulges and the outer pages creep, so perfect binding takes over. Wire-o is for catalogues that must lie dead flat on a counter — swatch books, price lists, sample catalogues.
| Component | Typical options |
|---|---|
| Binding | Saddle stitch 8–64 pp · perfect bound 48–240 pp · wire-o for flat-opening |
| Trim sizes | A4 210 × 297 · A5 148 × 210 · 230 × 300 · square 210 × 210 mm (typical) |
| Text stock | 115–170 gsm silk or matt art; uncoated for price lists that get written on |
| Cover | 250–350 gsm, matt or gloss lamination, spot UV, foil, soft-touch film |
| Proofs | PDF preflight, then one hard-copy contract proof before the run |
| Minimum order | 500 copies per title |
Colour consistency
The most common complaint about a publisher's catalogue is that the covers printed in it don't look like the covers on the shelf. That is a colour management problem, not a printing problem: if the catalogue and the book come from different plants with different ink sets and different paper, they will drift. We run both on the same presses to the same calibration, so a Pantone spot on page 14 and the same Pantone on the actual hardcover are printed from the same ink. For paper sourcing, FSC-certified coated stocks are available with chain-of-custody documentation on request.
FAQ
Saddle stitching, as long as the page count stays at or below about 64 pages on 130 gsm stock. Above that you either accept a bulging spine or move to perfect binding — the paper cost barely changes, but the binding step does.
Yes, if you send a physical copy of the book. We measure the printed cover, read it with a spectrophotometer and match the catalogue to the book rather than to a Pantone number — because the book is the reference your customers will compare against.
Not economically at 500 copies — variable data belongs on digital presses. Practical options are a separate short run for the differing region, or a price list printed as an insert so the catalogue itself stays common across markets.
