[stedders]

Some background first:
I work for a relatively new company, a small general printers with a Heidleberg Suprasetter CTP. We don’t use it for anything fancy we mainly use Quark Xpress / InDesign – my responsibility is to look after the “Mac side” of things.

I am wondering how I am meant to approach things when files are supplied as complete Acrobat pdf files.

I have previously been used to it from the other end: ie supplying artwork (including PDFs) to printers, but I am just not entirely sure how I am meant to approach Acrobat files for outputting.

I had one job recently (a 24 page catalogue) that came in as PDF file: but to output this I had to open each page into Adobe Illustrator, save as an EPS and then place in Quark Xpress for outputting. It worked, but it struck me as a heck of a lot of unnecessary work.

Am I missing something fundamental?

Any advice / tips / suggestions greatly appreciated.

[Mediaman_12]

Can't you just output from the Adobe reader app?
Surely all the 'repro' type options are handled in the rip's Postscript driver.

What you where doing sounds like the old fashioned 'long way round' from before Adobe started the integration of PDF in to the Postscript 'drivers', with modern Postscript EPS=PDF=Postscript.
But my memory is a little sketchy having been out of print production for 5+years.