Does Mac OS make PDFs suitable for going to Press?

Question

For some years I've been producing a series of small, relatively simple booklets (4x5", 44pp, text & scanned line-art graphics). I've been putting them together in PageMaker (v.5—yes, in OS 9), and making PDFs to go to press with Acrobat (v.5). Now I can't use PageMaker for the latest one, because it's in Japanese, which PM can't handle; so I'm trying Pages. Seems to work okay, but I'm wondering about the PDF part: Does Mac OS X's "Print to PDF" function make a PDF suitable for going to press, like the "Press" setting in Acrobat—i.e. with full-resolution graphics, etc.? (I know Mac OS's PDFs embed the fonts in the document, so that part would seem to be covered.) Anyone know if there's anything to worry about there? Anything special I need to do?
TIA,
Andrew Main

Answer 1

Can you post a screen snap and specification of your newsletter
What I'm working on is a reprint of the Japanese version of the Thanksgiving Address for The Tracking Project, a fine organization run by a friend of mine. The Thanksgiving Address is an ancient Mohawk prayer/invocation, thanking all the elements of the world around us for their contributions to our lives. The original version takes a week to recite (and an elder who died a decade ago may have been the last man who remembered the whole thing); this is a much abbreviated version for international distribution. We produced the first edition, in the original Mohawk and English, in 1993. A year or two later, one of John's associates in Germany said he'd like to do a German version, so we did that. And so on. We just put out an Italian version, making ten different languages, each with the original Mohawk. See below the cover and one spread from the original English version, and samples from the Hawaiian and the Japanese version, which I'm working on now.
I did the original English/Mohawk version in PageMaker in 1993, and every version since except the Japanese, as PageMaker doesn't handle Japanese. All the others are in the Latin alphabet, though the Hawaiian required a specially modified Palatino font (with accented letters in ASCII slots) which luckily someone at the University of Hawaii had made up in the pre-Unicode days. In the 90s I was sending PageMaker 5 files to the printer, which fortunately they could open and work onto the press; only in recent years have I come across an old copy of Acrobat and learned how to distill the PageMaker files into press-ready PDFs.
For the original Japanese version in 1999, I took the usual layout in PageMaker, with the Mohawk text but the space for the other text blank, had it printed out at a service bureau on fine paper, then made up the Japanese text in AppleWorks, had it printed, then pasted the Japanese text blocks onto the PageMaker printout, and took it to the printer, who fortunately still had a camera to photograph it. I've been in graphic arts since the 60s, and was an expert paste-up man (pretty good on the corner print shop black-and-white camera too, as well as the IBM Selectric Composer), worked on (among others) the Whole Earth Catalog in the 70s and Stereophile magazine in the 80s.
But now it's time to reprint the Japanese version, and the translator wants to make changes, so I figured it was finally time to try updating my work into the current computer world. I have no need of InDesign (nor money to buy it—or do you have to rent it now?). I first thought of using Libre/OpenOffice (wish they'd get that straightened out) for future file compatibility, and from what I knew it seemed to have all the details I needed for this simple job. But, as a Mac user exclusively since I got my first computer in 1988, I found the program opaque, and when I early ran into a situation where a command I needed wasn't on the menu the manual said it was on, I gave up and went to Pages, which I have used a little, though there's a lot about it I don't care for. It seems like a lot of effort has been put into the façade, but some pretty shoddy work behind it.
But I've found it not very difficult to set up the Japanese Thanksgiving Address job in Pages, only I'm concerned if the printer can use it. Thus my query here. I'll be contacting the printer, and send them a sample PDF to see if it works for them. I hope I won't have to add crop marks, as from my initial look at the Manual, it seems Master Objects are only available on WP documents (which seems dumb)—which means I would have to manually add them on all 44 pages. Anyway it's a simple job, black only, so it should be workable.
Apple has moved so far from their old base of professional print designers it would be safe to say it isn't going to do anything to fix the issues.
Yes, 'tis a pity indeed. Now if you could do professional graphics on an iPad, there'd probably be a lot of time put into perfecting it. The Mac, though, and what it used to do, is old hat.
Have you thought about running a 32 bit version of OSX that supports Pagemaker in emulation?
I tried that once, back in the OS X 10.4 days, and it made my fans go wild. Anyway, the problem is that PageMaker can't work with Japanese—or I could just run it on my G3 PowerBook as I do for the other jobs.