It sounds like you're over analyzing this project. There are so many issues for you. If I read correctly, you were going to spot matte on the text? You had colour variation with your PMS. You talked about yellowing.
The colour you want for your PMS is a created colour and open to interpretation for pressmen. Have your ink company create that colour, get a formula, get a colour swatch that shows the colour with gloss and matte. The pressman will have a constant to go by.
Again, if I read correctly, there was sheen difference on the PMS. All inks will have a different appearance due to the properties used to make colours.
I would suggest this and it's pretty simple. Strikethrough matte varnish with a gloss AQ coating. The matte varnish prints on areas you want a matte appearance. All pictures and gutters for binding are knocked out. The gloss AQ is applied overall with knockout areas for binding, (if youre perfect binding the book). The AQ reacts with the varnish leaving the matte area dull and your pictures glossy.
Have the shop doing your printing ask their supplier for the proper products.
You're being charged so much for, not just one sheet, you could probably get several hundred. You're paying for stock and and all the material and time involved to do a press make ready. All of that takes time and money.
Thanks for the response. Worth laying out the fuller arc here since a few replies in this thread are answering an earlier version of the problem.
This is a 400-page scholarly edition, six years in production, moved to this European printer from Taiwan specifically because the intended stock (Arctic Volume White, and Sappi Magno as a comparison) is matte and tactile — no varnish was ever the plan — and Taiwanese printers insisted they couldn't trust working with it in Taiwan unless I agreed to fundamentally alter the premium paper's surface texture by using an aqueous coating. We designed for matte text as would be expected from the matte stock, for unimpeded (glare-free) readability, while maintaining the pleasant more natural tactility of the premium stock without an added coating from the printer. The brief was: let the paper do the work.
Two things broke that plan, independently:
- Their press used UV LED ink and curing, with Toyo ink exclusively, which renders ink glossy regardless of formulation — not disclosed upfront, and not something a publisher planning around standard offset assumptions would know to ask about. Once that surfaced, we chased matte UV ink directly with the ink manufacturer; confirmed discontinued, no path back.
- Separately, both stocks — cross-tested — come back from this printer with their matte, tactile surface altered from mill samples, even in unprinted margins. Not ink-related. Something in their process is changing the paper itself. I've asked the printer, which states that no additional coating, aqueous or otherwise, was employed. They seem utterly unfamiliar with the change to the stock. I've asked the Arctic mill as well, which did not respond, but given the same transformation from pleasant largely matte finish and tactile surface changed on both stocks once tested at the printer (as compared to the direct-from-the-mill A4 samples), it's unlikely that it's a mill-side issue.
The fallback for the gloss problem of the ink and UV LED process became spot matte OPV varnish on letterforms, which worked for body text — but a wrinkle: proof testing (images run deliberately without our standard sepia retouch) showed the matte varnish itself adds a slight yellow tint to white/BW images, beyond what they should have (a 3% sepia added in the retouching becomes compounded by the varnish-added slight yellow tint). Therefore, if we cannot determine what's changing the surface quality of the supposedly bare stock at the printer, which we intended to keep natural for its premium touch/feel, then there's no longer a need to use the complex and costlier OPV varnish on letterforms only to attain matte text, and we can compromise on the tactility and just flood coat with matte varnish. But the 170 BW images need to have their subtle sepia taken down as the flood coat adds that hint of yellowing (and it may grow over time).
On top of that, color: a Pantone grey spec for annotation text has produced inconsistent results across proofs from the same printer — a 50/50 mix, then a pure shade, printing darker than expected with no clear explanation. The printer refused drawdowns. For fine 8.4 pt annotation text where the Pantone grey is used (and printed as a solid spot, not halftoned, for sharpness), it is challenging to evaluate from a color swatch.
So the live open questions are (1) what in the printer's process alters the paper surface (they do not seem to know), and (2) whether full-sheet flood coat is worth pursuing now as the only option left to render the text glare-free, as it would have been if the job had been executed with traditional, not LED UV process, on these largely matte stocks.
