From: "Nick Wilcox-Brown"
Hi Ellie,
This is a problem with people who are stuck in the past. If you are a repro house or publisher, surely it is a duty to be able to open files in the way they were designed to be seen, rather than bodge everything through stone age Quark? ( Sorry Rant over)
Nick,
Actually, the problem is a little more complicated than people being stuck in the past. While it is accepted that as technology advances, then so too must service bureaus and printers advance to handle the files that this new technology produces. The problem is that Adobe has started implementing things like transparancy settings into their programs that are causing so many issues with printers/service bureaus that they are holding web-seminars just to try and educate them on how to work-around the problems. The fact is that without siginifcant workarounds, InDesign and Illustrator 10 files will not print through many current RIPs used by printers, publishers and service bureaus (actually, the bureaus are more likly to adapt quickly as they are on the front lines dealing with many more file types).
The best case senario is that a printer upgrades all of it's RIPs to Postscript Level 3, which will enable direct handling of these new generation of Adobe Indesign/Illustrator files. Again, it's not that simple. The RIPs I work with are somewhere in the $50,000 range and to upgrade (3 in our case) several RIPs is just to expensive for many companies to handle right now. It is safe to say that the timing could be better (ecomony, war and all).
So most printers cling to Quark because above all else, they know that if you can place a file in Quark or better yet, create something in it, then it will RIP/Print correctly without jumping through several hoops. Most of the time no matter what format a file comes to a printer they will export it in some way to place into Quark just to get the print controls.
Many photographers hate Quark for several reasons not the least of which is the preview which is low-rez as pointed out before. So we are all moving toward Indesign and other alternatives, but unfortunatly the people on the other end of the process are not up to speed and for the time being, there will be conflict.
I work both sides of the equation and putting my printers hat on, I hate Indesign files and I DO have upgraded RIPs but there are still persistant problems with transparancy.
Just my 3 cents worth.
Robert
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