I’m embarrassed as I should know the answer to this. I’ve been doing a newsletter for a client for a number of years. I’ve always created all of the content, and a press quality PDF is sent to the printer. The client is now selling ad space and I have a couple of ads that were submitted as PDFs that need to run in the newsletter. Do I place the PDFs into InDesign just like I would an AI or PSD file, generate the press quality PDF, and send that to the printer? I feel silly for asking this question, but, after all the years I’ve been doing this, this is the first time I’ve run into this. The only other thing I can thing of is the printer “strips” in the ads when the newsletter is imposed in prepress. Thanks.
Placing PDF into InDesign is perfectly fine, provided the PDF is print quality.
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Yeah, that’s how we generally did things when I worked at a magazine — at least when we, for whatever reason, couldn’t get the source files. However, PDFs puts the onus on the preparer of the ad to get it right, which is something you can’t really depend on.
If I remember right, in the ad contracts, we’d specifically point out that any production problems caused by the ad having been built ineptly were automatically the clients’ fault with no recourse. Of course that was just to keep ourselves from being sued if something went wrong. In reality, we’d thoroughly check all these PDFs to make sure they would RIP and separate correctly before we sent the magazine to press then carefully check the proofs that came back before okaying the press run.
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Thank you, both.