Illustrator as a PDF editor poll

[mattbeals]

Maybe so. But now I spend more and more time  with management when they realize that they have to do something to lower operational costs before things get worse. That of course has to be balanced with budgets.

I think it was Beer who's company is now going to outsource prepress (to one degree or another, I don't recall how much). That's who hasn't paid attention to prepress and tends (not all) to be penny wise, pound foolish.

If you let things get too far behind you can end up at a tipping point where they can afford to upgrade or not. Or worse can't produce work in a timely and efficient manner. That's not a position a business want to be in.

Kind of like obesity or heart disease. You can wake up one morning with a sudden heart attack and say "oh shit I better do something". Or you can wake up one morning and decide to be proactive and start to deal with the problem before you wake up with a heart attack.

[beermonster]

ya know - i also think software and hardware vendors have a slice of blame here - they bring out so much stuff too regularly that the investment curve is so steep they are slowly pricing themselves out of some situations. I know another major packaging place in my home town doesnt have in-house prepress, preferring to send it out - they would have a large bill if they try to bring it in-house (which i'm trying to convince them to do), but by not being in the hunt does their outsourced repro bill outweigh the cost of in house repro

[hotmetal]

ya know - i also think software and hardware vendors have a slice of blame here - they bring out so much stuff too regularly that the investment curve is so steep they are slowly pricing themselves out of some situations. I know another major packaging place in my home town doesnt have in-house prepress, preferring to send it out - they would have a large bill if they try to bring it in-house (which i'm trying to convince them to do), but by not being in the hunt does their outsourced repro bill outweigh the cost of in house repro

I lay a lot more blame on the vendors who keep promising management that their product will totally eliminate the need for highly trained professionals and, as they've been touting since the late 1980's, allow them to do the work with untrained kids straight out of highschool. Pop the client's disk in a slot, double-click on the file, hit command-P. Why should this job pay more than minimum wage or even require a full-time employee? Why, the receptionist can do it in her spare time! The business owners keep trying to do it this way and keep finding that they actually still have to pay more in salary and benefits to make the stuff work, so they get frustrated and go back to dreaming of sending it all out. It's the nasty other side of the Desktop Publishing Revolution, where the owners were told that they didn't need to throw good money away with ad agencies or typeshops or art studios anymore, they could just plop a PC full of magic (and generally pirated) software down on the receptionist's desk and "the girl" could do all their typesetting and arty stuff for them in her spare time. Wait, am I being overly cynical again?


                     

[ratintrap]

ya know - i also think software and hardware vendors have a slice of blame here - they bring out so much stuff too regularly that the investment curve is so steep they are slowly pricing themselves out of some situations.

I'll second that.

[Possum]

Hotmetal, I don't think you're overly cynical, as evidenced by the Word and Publisher files we keep getting, accompanied by "PDF? Embed fonts? What's that?"

[ratintrap]

Hotmetal, I don't think you're overly cynical, as evidenced by the Word and Publisher files we keep getting, accompanied by "PDF? Embed fonts? What's that?"

Are you speaking Greek or something?

[gnubler]

they could just plop a PC full of magic software

quark?

[hotmetal]

Even way back then, Quark was somewhat piracy-protected, at least if you had more than one computer and it was networked...

[andyfest]

Yes I remember way back in the bad old days when one would ask "Hey is anybody else using Quark?"