My pdf's get rejected at my press-publishers

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thomasjohansen

Hi, I have been using Scribus for 5 years or so, with great succes.

But recently more and more press publishers tend to reject my pdf's exported from Scribus.

And thats even if I have avoided, all the basic pitfalls like opacity/transparency, made sure font are embed, only cmyk colors etc.

Today I got a simple pdf rejected with two text area's and a white background, fonts embed, exported to 1.4 pdf. (scribus 1.4.1)
And the only reason they could give me was, that there system didnt support scribus PDF library!


My normal publications are newspaper adds, and fabric banners.


How do you all cope with this when delivering to commercial publishers?   

really need some tips on avoiding getting rejected by the press-publisher's adobe prepress quality control.


I have attached the current pdf which has been rejected this time.

[attachment deleted by admin]

GarryP

Hypothetically - and my tin-foil hat is firmly secured - all Adobe would have to do is add a warning to their pre-press software that sounds, to the press-publishers' ears, as: "Are you really sure you want to risk getting sued and/or losing money if this document doesn't get printed properly because we don't support the software used to create this?" and that would be enough to make press-publishers wary.

I don't think that Adobe could stop people printing PDFs that don't use the Adobe libraries, that would be anti-competitive and they could be sued. However, they could - their expensive lawyers could reasonably insist - warn people that there could be risks (however large or small or undefined). And if they made the warning scary enough it would make people stop and think. Would you risk losing money if it was your business?

Basically - and this is pure conjecture of course - a company like Adobe with all of its international clout could do something that could be interpreted by some as: "Stop using stuff that wasn't made by us or we'll stop you using it by making it impossible to get things printed from it." and no-one could do anything about it.

However, if this totally speculative situation was even partly true (and who's to say it would be?), it would show that Scribus and other PDF creation applications were definitely on Adobe's radar as direct competition, or at the very least costing them revenue.

Unfortunately, as I see it (and I could have it totally wrong), I don't think there's any way you can stop this problem - if it's as I tentatively presume - other than using an alternative press-publisher, but that's not an option for many people. I don't know if passing your document through Acrobat (not Reader) would make any difference, but that would require laying out money on an Adobe product - with its "you're-paying-us-for-life-now" licensing structure - anyway.

Sorry, but I hope someone else has a more cheery reply for you. (And as I've said, I could be totally wrong about all of this and there is no "monster under the bed" after all.)

Tin-foil hat is now removed. Sanity levels approaching "normal". Has the nurse been moving my stuff again?  ???

thomasjohansen

I do see your tinfoil perspective and I actually do think there are some truth in it.

I sent a newspaper add to another commercial publisher (national newspaper) this week, and I "warned" them that it was made by Scribus DTP and that it followed all the standards.

I did'nt heard a word about it and it was published the day after. either I just got lucky that it didnt lid any warning lights in their quality check, or they ignored it because of my explanation or they converted it which I actually do'nt think so because they were in a hurry.


I hope someone else in here could tell a little about their trouble or workaround when sending material to publishers. I do'nt think I'm the only one.




 

utnik

hi thomas

i had more problems with commercial printers with files exported by inDesign than with those from scribus – but the reason for this is that i was a dtp newbie when i used inDesign...
i think, scribus exports high quality .pdf files. you'll run only into real problems, when you do something wrong with the export settings (.pdf version, transparency, color management, bleeds...)
the other problem (maybe yours) is the fact, that some printers still distrust a file generated by an open source program...

utnik