[pdftex] Harlequin RIP 5.3 and PDFTeX

[Hans Hagen]

At 09:59 PM 10/6/2001 -0400, Jeffrey McArthur wrote:

>It really does not matter.  If the PDF out of PDFTeX will not run through
>any level 3 RIP, then we are stuck.
  ^^^

i wonder if there is a kin dof trip test for rips, since anyone can claim 
that their rip is level 3

>The problem is very political.  A lot of people we deal with want files from
>PDFTeX to fail.  They will find any excuse they can to say that PDFTeX does
>not produce "press-quality" PDF files.

hm, my version of adobe photoshop produces useless pdf code.

What exactly is press quality? the first versions of pdf had no cmyk, 
actually i heard adobe people say years ago that they would like to get rid 
of it, which made made the present people start crying. one of the ideas 
behind pdf is to get rid of programming aspects of ps (thereby avoiding 
problems in rips) and postponing certain things to the rip (like 
separation). So, in fact a pdf file is rather simple and stupid [i assume 
that you don't use transparency which for me is like some other pdf spec 
things a kind of virtual feature since i still have to see the first file 
using it]. So, given that pdftex files view ok in acrobat and ghostview, i 
think the problem is with the printing house. Maybe it's time to start 
looking for another one.

>So far, they have a point.  You cannot send a PDF generated by PDFTeX to a
>printer and expect them to be able to print your book with it.  You have to
>flip the PDF from PDFTeX back to postscript and then re-distill it to
>produce a "press-quality" PDF file.

which is what some printing houses do themselves anyway; in that case you 
may pray that they have set the distiller options right

>This is sort of a shame, since now PDFWriter and MS-Word can produce a file
>that will go through the RIP without any problems, so Word is now
>"press-quality" but PDFTeX is not.

Are you joking? The fact that a document prints does not mean that it 
prints all right. I can print such documents here too, but the fact that i 
see a courier instead of a times makes me wonder what happened in between. 
Interestingly, i recently read an article about pdf and printing problems 
and in this doc they showed some examples and, surprise, this article 
itself had helvetica replaced by courier. [the proof was in the article] 
but nobusy had seen this 'bug' in printing.

Hans
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