[MikeM32]

Well in short I don't know where else to post this so I figured what the heck Bragging? Gloating? Yes, I gotta get it out of my system

My Art Director/Pre-Press Supervisor was on vacation this week, so her boss had asked me to fill-in. I've never worked in a supervisory capacity before but have been somewhat handy with maintaining our small network of Mac systems, and recommending upgrades and so on. Perhaps this is why I was asked to take on some of her responsibilities in her absence.

I'd say by today (the end of the week) I'd had a fairly tight grasp on managing the department and overseeing work on the Macs, in our proofing or "Art" department, proofreading, negative/film checking, and other duties assigned to various personnel.

I now have a new respect for my boss and her duties, that I never truly appreciated before. It was a challenging experience to say the least, but I dove right into it. Not aware of how well I handling things however, I was glad to hear today from our production supervisor (my bosses boss) that I was doing a great job

The true test was today when we had 24 jobs in PDF format, and only two of our 5 Macs were outputting correctly. I have yet to figure out the exact nature of the problem, but was capable of getting everyone at least working to assemble these files and then have one person output them to our Laser printers and Imagesetter on one of the systems that was outputting correctly.

The problem however still boggles my mind, and I was only told by one of our workers that there used to be a problem with customer supplied PDF files which contained something like "Embedded Font Profile's" under the document info>fonts panel in Acrobat 4. What's stranger is that the two systems that output correctly were both Blue and White G3 systems, while the ones having problems were all pre Blue and White G3 models (a 9500/200, a 9600/300 and a Beige G3/300 Mini Tower). All of our systems are running OS 9.1, and Acrobat 4.



But otherwise I'd say the work got done at least so everyone was happy with the department Next week I'll try to pinpoint the real nature of the problem(s) with these PDF files since I won't be so busy running around like a "Chicken without a head" trying to over-see everything.

Mike

[Corys]

we have also had a helluva time getting some PDF's to RIP properly for us as well..
workarounds have been to output directly from acrobat, use the qxp PDF pluging, save as eps, import into AI9.
PDF is definetly to future when it comes to ripping/trapping/imaging.
we have a older harlequin RIP running a screen FT-3050, the version of the HQ RIP is not a pdf based workflow, so I'm guessing that's where most of our problems are..
but anyway...I feel your pain..
glad to hear you made it through the week.
being the prepress foreman is no fun when you have a couple of pressman breathing down your neck also..

[MikeM32]

That's funny we're also using an older harlequin RIP, and that may be the problem in and of itself. We've been looking into a new RIP anyway, so hopefully that will solve the problem.

Fortunately (or not in many cases) wer'e not directly connected to our printing plants, so that's one less thing to worry about on our end

But it can be a set-back too since we rarely get to see half the stuff we do while it's being printed or in it's finished form.

For some reason I'm starting to suspect the newest "AdobePS" 8.7.1 may be the culprit with these PDF "anamolies".

I think I'll stroll over to adobe forums and see if I can get some answers

Mike

[IonCable]

If you have to deal with PDFs a lot get your company to Buy Crackjack or Enfocus Pitstop. Crackjack makes outputing PDFs to a RIP a breeze and Pitstop will allow some editing on the PDFs to fix things like embedded RGBs or worse yet LAB color files. You can even replace images with hi-res if needed.