Sometimes the relationship between creative professionals and their printers is not the best. My recent blogs point out some of the tensions. For example, Bob Levine wrote in my Creating PDF: Export or Use Distiller blog, “Send[ing] pre-flattened PDFs may be the safest choice when you have no idea of the printer, but as the others have pointed out, it most certainly is not the best choice. I have personally refused to use a printer that demands flattened work since ID 2.0 was released.”
Creatives and printers have different experiences and expectations: In Bob’s case, he may have worked with a printer who used obsolete RIPs and software, or whose knowledge was out-of-date. A print service provider may have received files that were poorly prepared, with missing fonts and graphics, or transparency features that seemed impossible to print correctly.
But education can help printers get more up-to-speed. Adobe offers free training for print service providers in North America (as well as others who are preparing files for print) with weekly online eSeminars. (Truth in advertising: I’m one of those who prepares and delivers these eSeminars for Adobe.)
There are sessions this fall on InDesign CS2, Acrobat 8 Professional, PDF-JDF Workflow, Transparency, and several other topics. The sessions are 90 minutes long, and cover what printers and those preparing files for print really need to know. The live sessions also give the participants a chance to ask questions via chat. They are hosted with Adobe’s Acrobat Connect web conferencing software (formerly Breeze) which works better than most.
A couple of the sessions are already past (like the one for InDesign), but all the sessions are (or will be) available as on-demand downloads, also free. These contain all the content of the live sessions, but there’s no opportunity to chat with the presenter. And a new series of the live eSeminars should begin again in December. See you there!
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on September 29, 2006
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