Indonesia’s Future of Offset Printing (Perhaps No PDFs)
Frankly speaking, I am quite pissed for these two days for the fact that there are still many (and I mean many) printing companies in our country that are not PDF-compatible. The story goes like this. One of our clients are going to print seven different kinds of letterheads, one for each branch that they have. The logical solution for this is obviously sending out print-ready PDF files of those letterheads, to whichever vendors they use, this will avoid the chances of film output mistakes. So I told them to have the vendor call me for a pre-press brief. And oh yes, they told me that they can accept PDFs, which turned out that they don’t, and they can only accept FreeHand or CorelDraw files for film outputs. Yes, they do accept PDFs, and then converts them into either FreeHand or CorelDraw, and then go on with the film output. But they have no means of a direct CTF process from PDFs whatsoever. They even asked me for the missing typefaces. Since when does a print-ready PDF asks for a missing typeface file?
This is just unacceptable. All these years, all of the printing and film output companies that we’ve worked with have been accepting PDFs without any problems. What year is this? I feel like I’m back to 1995 all of a sudden. Come on, if you can’t accept PDFs as a standard file format for your printing company, chances are, you better close down.