What Does Camera-Ready Mean?
Camera-ready is a term that means a piece of printed material, such as a book or a paper, is ready to go to press. The term derives from offset printing to refer to the finalization of the layout on a paste-up board. The pages to be printed would be photographed and then turned into plates for printing. The term persists for the final output of programs like Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress.
Techopedia Explains Camera-Ready
Camera-ready copy refers to the output of any desktop publishing program, such as Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress or even LaTeX, that is considered ready to go to press. The term derives from documents laid out on a paste-up board that were photographed to be turned into plates for offset printing.
Camera-ready output is usually high-resolution EPS, PDF or TIFF files in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black). Fonts are converted to raster graphics or included in the package sent to the printer. Graphics are usually 300 dpi or greater.
