[pdftex] Print house problems

[Ville Voipio]

I have a LaTeX document which I have made with the following tools:

  Vector images:   CorelDraw 8 -> eps -> Acrobat Distiller 4.0 -> pdf
  Raster images:   Corel Photopaint 8 -> eps -> Acrobat Distiller 4.0 -> pdf
  Math curves:     MatLab 6 -> eps -> Acrobat Distiller 4.0 -> pdf

  pdfTex version:
  "This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159-14f-released20000525 (MiKTeX 2 UP 1)"

The print house I am using seems to use Harlequin and SciTex RIP. I think
(not sure, though) that the SciTex is for Xerox DocuColor and Harlequin for
the b/w system. The problems I am describing here come from the Harlequin.

The document checking system (PitStop or something like that?) did not
complain anything about the file. However, there we noticed a problem; the
system listed grayscale as the only color model in the document. There
should have been cmyk images, as well. A number of eps images should be in
cmyk, and the images look right on the screen (well, with slightly wrong
colors, as the default cmyk of acrobat seems to be something different from
Euroscale). Why isn't the information right in the pdf? Can I do something
about this?

An even worse problem occurred when the print house people tried to run the
document. Their RIP crashed. This seems to have happened on a page with a
mathematical curve with a large number of elements (the pdf image file is
around 300k, and there are no raster images in the file).

Also, I have been able to make some HP printers crash on another image. The
image combines several bitmaps and some grayscale stuff. I would not be so
worried about this, though, as some other printers cope well with that image
(cheap HP printers may have buggy RIPs).

Any ideas what is wrong and if there is any way to help it?

TIA,

- Ville