Hi all, this is my first time on GDF and my apologies if these topics have been rehashed to death. I'm new to prepress and have hit a wall when it comes to working with spot colors & transparencies in illustrator and .dcs spot channels in quark. First, are there ways of using (vendor friendly) spot colors with transparencies in illy without flattening the file? If not how do I properly flatten a 2 color illustrator file using transparencies (effects>>shadows)? Also, does anyone know why .dcs files in quark separate improperly? I have a .dcs file overlapping a quark picture box using a pantone named exactly as the spot channel in photoshop. When printing out the seps the saturation of the .dcs file always appears to be 3-5% lighter then the quark applied spot. What is the reason and how do I solve it? HELP!!