I work in a family business and my dad told me a story about a big job for us that he had to turn away back in the late 70's.  The job was all ready to run, the paper was in but when the copy came in it was a communist May Day newspaper.  My dad refused to run it and sent the guy away.  He later returned with a bag with about $20,000 CASH in it, trying to convince him to do the job. This guy may have been a communist but he would have made a better capitalist.  My dad stood by his principles and told him to take a hike.

I had a college professor (well known in the industry) that told a story of a book printing plant in the south that got in a lot of hot water because they stuffed boxes of Bibles with scraps from a nudie magazine.

Metallic inks are very abrasive.  We don't have many long runs with metallics but I wouldn't be suprised to find out that our metal plates would only have 25% of normal life expectency.  For a plastic plate life could be VERY short.

I will try the suggestions.  Converting to outlines may work, I will have to try it. I'm not too wild about force flattening it but it may be a simple solution.

I am already doing PDF-> PDF through Preps.

I was wondering, I have a Harlequin RIP, do Adobe RIPs do automatic substitutions the way Acrobat does?

Thanks for the suggestions.

I have a customer that furnishes PDFs that do not contain all the fonts and I do not have the correct fonts on my system. I have gone down the road with the customer of trying to get the fonts embedded and have reached a brick wall.

As it is designed to do Acrobat substitutes the Adobe sans MM and Adobe seriff MM fonts in their place.  These simulated fonts work fine for the documents, they are just forms. My problem is that I need to have all the fonts embedded for imposition and output through Preps. Is there a way to make Acrobat "permanently" substitute and embed the Adobe MM fonts in the PDF to be used instead of the original designated font?

Being from a mom & pop shop, perhaps I can shed some light. 

We have terms and conditions on the back of our quote form based upon the old trade customs.  In the 20 or so years we have had them we have never pointed them out to a customer, because if we did, we may win the battle but lose the war.  When you resosrt to the fine print, especially as a small business, nothing is to be gained, you may get paid or win in court but the customer will just go to the printer down the street. In other words, the words don't matter, so few of us care what words are used. To be honest, their value is that they make the form look more important and professional.

I took a quick look at the "Best Business Practices for the Printing Industry". It looks like a useful document, the terms and condition section looks basically the same except perhaps it deals with todays technology better.

I think I will have to take some more time to look through the Best Practices, this is the first I have heard of it. But, for now, I have to go now, so I can read my cell phone contract.

I think some were left out simply because of Weber's lack of knowledge of the devices because they have not bought or sold many or any of them.  I think most of this info was gleaned from experience selling and servicing the machines and not so much from research.

"Unhappy Customers"

What are those????

We use a DOS based dBase IV application that I developed back in the 80's. Runs in a DOS window on our PCs , won't work with Macs.  It is VERY outdated but still works surprisingly well and I can make changes to the programs but it is getting kind of hard to remember all the commands. We can lookup old jobs and create new job tickets and can track the job through the shop. It doesn't do accounting or estimating which are handled by Peachtree and Franklin Estimator respectively.

I have looked at several packages but most just don't look like they would work for us and many of them are just too expensive.  I have been looking at getting Filemaker and developing a new system that I can import all my old data into.

Just finished reading Bob Weber's white paper on CTP. It's great, has a lot of straight talk and information about platesetters. No sales hype or pitches just good information.

I strongly recommend anyone considering CTP equipment, new or used, to read it.

I have no relationship with Bob Weber except that I have bought a few machines from them over the years

1- Duplicator
1- 2/c 20"
1- 4/c 20"
1- 2/c 26"
1- 5/c 26"
1- 2/c 38"
1- 5/c 38"
1- 2/c 48"

I still have a station with 9. Use it for Pagemaker and to backsaving Quark docs to 4 so I can convert them to Indesign.  Have an Intel mac and it won't run classic.

I must be one of the few that has had very few problems with Q7.  Installed fine, activated have been using export to make PDF's and all has been good.  The only problem I have had is that the autoactivate extension for Suitcase Fusion crashes Quark when I try to open a 6.5 or earlier document, so I turned it off.  The only other thing is the lack of keeping transparency live, looks like everything gets flattened.

Wouldn't want to use it as a creative tool any more but it works much better for prepress than 6.5

Extended

8 only

We haven't experienced much competition from them because most of our jobs are pretty short runs but I have heard from others in longer run shops losing some work to the Chinese.

Just goes to show that what all the printing pundits say about "give your customers good service and quality and price won't matter" is a load of crap.  All of the sudden the customers that insisted they need there jobs tomorrow can now wait 6 weeks to get the job from China because it's so much cheaper. We have been trying to tell them for years that if you give us a few extra days we can do it cheaper and better quality but they won't believe it.

My guess is that it will only take a few more years and China will implode. Those people will only work so long in those sweat shops for a cup of rice cooked in polluted water. Things will have to change over there guickly or the streets wil be running red.