I agree with some of the comments on the pdf issue we have been sent good and bad pdfs from many different clients in different countries and it all depends on education of the designers and creators of the files be they indesign quark or pdfs generated from these programs if adobe and quark where smart they would concentrate on helping lecturers and teachers on the courses understand the new features and the pitfalls of the programs and this would lead to the creation of a better class of files all round. If files are put together incorrectly it is to do with the user not being aware of the options or is not willing to learn them. I work in the print production and design area myself and in my 6 busy years I have seen files come and go and only on a few occasions have I ever received print ready files, this i believe is down to a number of factors time allowed on jobs, experience of designers and print production people, education, good communication with the customers, most important of all an open mind and willingness to learn from one's mistakes. I use all three formats in our production environment and while I like to use Indesign the most this however does not mean that I can stop learning Quark 6 and Acrobat just because I have a favourite format because by doing that I become eminently less employable (look at what happened to the guys stripping film who didn't adapt where are they now) to my employer or prospective employers, my boss(es) need someone with an expansive skill set who is willing to learn all the time so that they can make money and profits which is the name of the game.

I'm with printhead, squish and geozinger on this one. The adoption of PDF as a prepress workflow 'standard'* file format is being driven by Adobe for their own commercial reasons - it's not something that the industry at large has actually voted for, and in my experience this new workflow doesn't produce better results. What it does produce is many more and subtle ways in which someone can screw up a 'press-ready' file and much less flexibility for the people who have to 'fix it' at the end of the cycle [cf; squish's response]. Adobe and their apologists like to exaggerate industry take-up for InDesign [like the misleading Time-Warner reference in this article], and claim that the seamless integration of their software products produces hassle-free separations; this is still not the case 16 years after the introduction of postscript, and frankly I wouldn't trust anyone to produce 'press-ready' PDF files unless they had a working knowledge of postscript printing to film separations... and these are generally NOT the people Adobe is selling inDesign to. This heralds the adoption not just of PDF, but also of 'enterprise software values' to professional prepress and the realisation that, just as in the early days of postscript, the absolute beginners are back. Sam and Eric may say that the service bureaus are dead, but we are about to need their understanding and their skills more than ever. As they'll tell you *"the great thing about standards - is that there's so many of them".

I work at a small shop in Atlanta that produces a fair amount of material in the form of newsletters, magaletters and tabloids for the financial services industry. I found that when we switched to InDesign a while back we had to push our printing partners to move ahead with us. They grumbled a bit but they wanted the business enough to make the adjustment. Now, over two years later, they are more than happy to accept our InDesign files. I realize it's not always easy to find a provider in some areas but if you keep looking you will realize that you are not the only one that has discovered InDesign to be a viable alternative. The pre-press revolution is still on. It's up to us end-users to keep it going. Keep pushing for better solutions!

I do Agree with most positions represented in the article, except the small number of printers found who would accept ID or PDF files. First let me say this; Adobe has made the "find a service provider" function on their web site nearly impossible to get to. Even knowing it is there, you need to go to some obscure places to get to it. It really needs to be more permanently linked on their main page. And, even though Adobe's service provider program is a good one, and listings in this directory is free, you can not conclude that these are the only establishments that fit the criterion you are looking for. There obviously are many more that just are not listed in Adobe's data base. And I guess I just don't get it. In todays very competitive, very soft market, we bend backwards for our customers, and make every effort to accommodate them with any file they send us. Do we gently try to guide them to the applications we really like working with, well yes, of course. But in our case, having adopted InDesign as our in house creation application, receiving InDesign files is a joy.

Does the PDF format have the potential to solve compatibility problems for printers and designers? Absolutely. It has amazing possibilities. However, the experience in our prepress department with client-provided PDFs is abysmally horrid. Yes, we can always open the PDF files. But they have other problems created by the client. Inevitably the client requests changes to the file, for which the PDF format is not optimal. Type corrections will be asked for, but no fonts are sent and none are embedded in the file. The color spaces will be RGB or index, but the client will not like the RIP's conversion to CMYK. The embedded raster images will be 400% ink in some places. Or the will be low-res. Or they will be compressed in a lossy format at low quality. Or they have not built bleed into files and/or cropped raster images so that there isn't anything to work with. Or they rasterize text at 300 dpi and later wonder why it looks "fuzzy." These are the kind of PDFs we deal with here; I NEVER see a PDF made appropriately for high-quality printing. Perhaps you have the luxury of receiving PDFs made only by knowledgable designers, but we do not. In the PDF realm, it all "looks good" to them so it should "work" for us. At least the previous patchwork of files gave us a better chance of massaging files into something printable in a timely manner.

InDesign is a nice concept, and Acrobat 6 shows great promise. If prepress could be all Adobe, I'm sure everyone would jump on the bandwagon. But with all the 3rd and 4th party technologies required for prepress to function properly, freelancers, agencies and clients are going to have to live with industry limitations.

Yes, it is unfortunately true that some won't accept that, and will leave you for Joe Printer down the street. This is hardly news. More useful information, I think, is that printers can and should develop relationships and reputations with their clients, which can help smooth the rough times of technology transitions.

As a survivor of the prepress wars, we've seen software come and go. Up until recently, PDF workflows and tools were not completely de-bugged, and it's taking quite a while for prepress information to be disseminated by the larger creative community.
It's very easy for creatives to whine about prepress and in house shops who don't update to the latest/greatest the moment it comes out, but workflows are a huge investment for any shop. Most of them cannot turn on a dime like that, but there are quite a few that are very adaptable. Either they are in the position to change their workflow or have unsung heroes on their staff who "just make it work." (actual words spoken to me while fixing a Publisher file that went south...)
My shop is in the unique position of purchasing a new direct to plate system, which will include a new PDF based workflow that will allow us to work with the "enterprise" office software, although we have been dealing with PDF and Office software for years now, and are pretty good at it. We are fortunate, but not all shops are. I understand their reluctance to switch, there are too many un-and under-informed "creatives" (and I use the term "creative" loosely) out there that have the slightest understanding of the process, and are the first to abandon (or bad mouth) you when things go wrong. And usually the thing that went wrong is a file THEY supplied, and they have the arrogance to expect us to "just make it work".
Of course, we are in business, we will make it work. But you can understand some shops reluctance to change, or to demand things that they know will work, and I really can't blame them. However, the author is right, many of these shops will not survive, but it's not entirely their doing. Software manufacturers release updates with great new features, but many shops cannot afford to easily upgrade on their release cycles. I think the demand and the time has come for the software companies to produce solid, stable software and RIP's etc., that aren't so susceptible to being obsoleted so rapidly as they have been in the past.