Hi Cor, here is another non-technical solution to your problem: change the printer!
I had similar problems in the past, i.e. studios who produce plates for printers as an additional source of income. I worked for a company which had chosen a printer that didn't make the plates himself, but let it do by contractual partners. When the company history I wrote was finished in all its glory (in Scribus!), the studio received the PDF. Shortly thereafter, the guy who was supposed to do the RIP complained about that "broken" PDF file. Either fonts were not printed or colours were wrong and so on. The same happened with the cover, made by a studio in the UK (in FreeHand). The reason was the use of Quark. I asked him to use Acrobat and appropriate software instead, but he claimed he had never done this before and that it always worked fine with their own files. I immediately called up the company and the printer to let the plates be produced by someone else. They did, and with Acrobat + PitStop everything worked just fine. As a general rule, don't look at the price for a print job only. You also /have/ to talk to the printers. With a bit of experience, you will learn to separate the wheat from the chaff, just by talking. An example: Currently, I am preparing a travelling exhibition which contains about 60 presentation boards (ca. 1 m x 1 m). To get the boards produced, I had to solicit bids for the printing. One of the bids was significantly cheaper than the other ones. When I called the company, they told me that the only accept high-resolution TIFFs (1200 dpi) for presentation boards. My question about pixelised fonts and other vector data was answered: "That's no problem, our RIP uses interpolation". At that moment, they lost, because I know how presentation boards made with bitmap files look like. They didn't accept PDF or EPS, not even PS, and that's why I chose the next bid, which prefers CMYK-PDFs. groeten, Christoph
