2005-04-22 - 9:24 a.m.
FACT.
The industry I work in is being overtaken by the exponential growth of technology.
The physical machines we use to print are massive million dollar plus behemoths that fill a warehouse several times over. The machines and programs we use to prepare and receive the files built by our clients to print from are getting smaller and smaller in actual physical size (megabites etc) yet are being filled with more and more information (postscript language)
This type of growth is making the average print production/prepress office a very comlicated place indeed. We need to give our postscript files to a printing machine that was happy with postscript 5 years ago. Updating a million dollar machine like that is something that not too many companies can do every year unlike software companies that insist you update their software packages every year (sometimes less)
What entails is a farce. Here is a classic "for instance"
For me to get a postscript file that our printer can happily decifer out of a client supplied pdf that is less than 1 meg (thanks to advances in the postscript language) It is a 152 page document. As well as the actual viewable document, the file contains "Composite H" fonts, RGB information, ICC color bases, security information, differing page borders (art board, trim, bleed and media) OPI (picture links), hair lines, overprint and knockout data... the list goes on, I have to open the document in Acrobat 5 and remove and change all this information which includes actually building some items in other programs (illustrator) to replace throughout the document. Saving it as a level 1, binary, 8 bit postscript file. I then distill the file back into a pdf with distiller 5. I then open it in Acrobat 6, perform an action that makes it openable in acrobat 4. I open it in Acrobat 4 and save it again as a postscript file and then and only then can our printers print it.
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