This really happened. A client once screamed for 20 minutes about his bad experience with a local printer. "They're medieval!" he ranted. "Printing is like alchemy - the printer disappears with your job behind the pressroom doors, and you've no idea what's going on back there! They communicate nothing." He'd decided the whole industry was evil.

He had reason to complain, for the printer had delivered a shoddy product. But I hated that he generalized about all printers.

He could have had a successful experience if he'd worked with his printer in deliberate ways. Here are 8 tips on how to do just that:

1. Good printers are the rule, not the exception. Most printers work very hard to deliver what customers want. They have an amazing amount of technical expertise. If you haven't found a great printer, keep looking.

2. Make it personal. Find a salesperson you like. He/she should be experienced, reliable, honest and reachable - you don't need someone who seems to go AWOL on you. And pick one who'll go the extra mile.

3. Keep your printer in the loop. One of the biggest mistakes that print buyers make is failure to involve the printer soon enough. The success of your print jobs depends in large part on your communicating early and often with your printer.

4. Play fair. Since every job is a custom job, respect that it can take time to print something well. Don't cry wolf and impose artificial deadlines, when in reality you could wait another day or two.

5. Be specific. Every detail about a print job affects its price: the format, number of pages, quantity, inks, paper, folds, etc. Put someone who's detail-conscious in charge of your printing. And give the printer ALL of the specs up front, don't eke them out over days or weeks.

6. Discuss file formats. How you prepare your files is very important to a printer. The platform of choice among printers is still the Mac. Programs like Word and Publisher were not created for output on a commercial press. Find out early if what you're creating is printable.

7. Ask questions. Don't be intimidated by the language. Unless you're used to dealing with printers, chances are you'll need lots of terms translated. If you don't understand something, ask!

8. Be clear about responsibilities. Clarify what your role is vs. the printer's. A businessman I know had his printer do some typesetting. He approved a proof of the job, but he failed to notice a typo that the printer had typeset. He OK'd the job to print. When the job delivered, he noticed the typo (but of course). The printer wasn't responsible; he was. Proofreading is almost always a client's responsibility.