Mac said:
I'm going to argue with you (again) on this, Mike.
A properly prepared PDF, great! BUT this is a moving standard. What is
proper for one shop may not be for another, so it is critical to find
out how they want it. Such issues as how is bleed to be handeled vis a
vis page size, and of course font embedding, and the usualy stuff.
industry-wide the percentage of pdf supplied that are properly prepared
is less than 20%.
Resolving these issues in the PDF is going to cost easily 2-10 times
what fixing it in the native applicstion would.
We frequently get business cards submitted one card floating in the
middle of a letter page. Or worse, they come in imposed 10X or something. (
10X is absurd for printing 500 business cards on press).
It all boils down to user knowledge. MS Publisher users as a group
usually have the least such knowledge of the major dtp applications. So
it is quite natural to rather not get something submitted as PDF when
the chances of it being wrong are so very high.
OTOH, there are a great many idiots on the prepress lines as well.
Idiots that think everything has to be output from Quark or must be
macintosh-based.
If a user knows what they are doing and wants to proivide proper pdf,
then they ought to discuss it with the print shop or the service bureau
that the shop uses. Do not assume you know what they want.
In your own case, you've tuned your workflow with that of your printer
over a period of time. You could submit them graven grapefruit skins
provided you know how they like them. But Joe Blow? That is going to be
a problem.
in the case at hand, the mac-only shop can't take publisher files, so
what good would it dfo them (except to let them redo the whole thing and
charge for it, blaming "stupid Microsoft" instead of themselves.
Mac,
Okay, you have your points. But in this case, the printer didn't really
want to consider trying the pdf. I completely understand printers who
don't want to suffer fools, but not those who will not give a client a
chance to show they have a clue.
From my experience, which admittedly is more confined to a specific
area, I've run across some seriously inept printers. Today, a customer
wants to do a double truck featuring his menus. He had a couple of
changes so was going to have the printer send me the update. Guess what
I got - a pdf file that was a scan of the menu. Imagine trying to scan
8.5 type then make a pdf of it. When I asked if he had something a
little more useable, he sent me a pdf of the file itself. That was
better, but it still would have meant having to typeset a couple hundred
items, increasing the chances for typos, especially given that I was
supposed to get the file last week. I asked again, and found out it was
done in PageMaker. I convinced him to send me the original file. In this
case, though, I will copy/paste the items and prices, etc., then format
them to print a tabloid page. I really ought to get into a better line
of work!
Mike
