PDF format

[roskav]

Just upgraded to creative suite 3 ... and horror of horrors... had to spend hours trying to rejig my printing preferences for the booklets of images I supply with my images on disk.
After fruitless tangoing with a system that I only want to know what I need to know... It gradually dawned on me that the adobe system seems to be channeling everything towards a common pdf based graphic/text/image file that can be optimised for various uses.  Problem of printing eventually sorted .. but it meant creating a pdf file before I could print. (Odd and even spreads)
A graphic designer had actaully said this to me about a year ago .. that his printers prefer pdfs .. and that this is the way things are going generally.

The questions is .. should photographers be thinking about supplying in this format? I don't know the metadata capabilites of a pdf file ... it seems to be geared towards cmyk printing... but it does offer a degree of control in this respect.

Ros

www.roskavanagh.com

[roskav]

I think this might be important.. anyone have an opinion?

Ros

[jjlphoto]

Files submitted to magazines and such have been done as PDF for quite some time now. These are locked CMYK separated file with vector text and bit mapped graphics all together. It is not the same as the "print to PDF" on ther Mac OSX.  You really need to know what you are doing.

[roskav]

interesting.... and would that be a photogrpaher supplying pdf format?  I know the pitfalls of setting up the cmyk wrongly for your print house or magazine ... the thing is I think that very few people I come accross really know what they are doing either ... and that's referring to printers also!

[pfigen]

Most photographers are not qualified to supply press ready CMYK either as tiffs or pdf. Those that are, and you know who you are, will need to be able to make a valid pdf-x1a for delivery to various publications. The advantage is that everything is locked down. The disadvantage is that everything is locked down, and if something needs to be changed, it has to come back to you. There are many options in the Distiller dialogs that can trip you up. Even the defaults are not acceptable for me as they automatically use jpeg compression, which can, in rare instances, cause problems. While pubs are more likely to request pdf-x1a, higher end printers printing sheetfed may prefer to have your Quark or InDesign document for when things go wrong - and they will, sooner or later.