Printer (not computer printer) for 10,000 piece 8 page brochure??

Question

I have created this brochure in Pages. It is 8 pages 8X10 and I need a commercial printer. Having a little problem with my local printer because he has never worked with Pages and I do not see that as a problem for him in that I am sending him a .pdf file.
Open to all suggestions.
Thanks
John Melvin
Cactus Bill Productions

Answer 1

I do not see that as a problem for him in that I am sending him a .pdf file.
Well, use of the Portable Document Format in and of itself does not guarantee that the printing master is properly prepared.
For instance, you can have QuickTime movies and hyperlinks in a Portable Document Format pagination, but you definitely don't want to have that in your printing master.
You can have image resolutions that are too low for the intended printing condition, and you can have colour spaces that are incorrect for the intended printing condition.
"All my images are CMYK" - right, but what CMYK? CMYK is just a data format, to be precise, a four component / four channel data format. You may have all images in CMYK, but one image may have been converted for newsprint with a low paper white and a total ink limit of 240%, another may been converted for inkjet with a high paper white and 220% total ink limit, and yet another may have been converted for offset with a high paper white and 340% total ink limit. Further, the colours formed by the colourants in the CMYK images may be very, very different.
In other words, don't place pre-converted CMYK in your pages. Place original colour correct RGB colourants referenced to the physical or virtual device space in which the RGB capture was corrected (e.g. AdobeRGB, EktaSpaceRGB, PhotoGamutRGB etc.). Since a printing system cannot print three component RGB, it has to convert to four component CMYK.
The ICC printer profile for the intended CMYK four component printing condition defines the laydown order of the inks (which may not be CMYK), the total ink limit, the gray balance, the colour detail in shadows, and the colour detail in highlights. This is a very, very nicely engineered file of only 1.5Mb that does all the difference, if you use it right.
And this is where we come to the PDF/X filter in the ColorSync Utility. PDF/X is short for PDF for blind eXchange, that is, PDF/X is a rendering specification that eliminates what you should not have in your printing master, checks that what you do have in your printing master is reasonable, and saves out your printing master with the ICC printer profile of your choice as OutputIntent.
One thing, check that the PDF/X filter is set to 300 dpi, and check that you pick the right ICC profile for OutputIntent. The filter has no way of knowing what printing condition you intend, so ask your printer, and pick a profile for that printing condition from those available at www.eci.org. The reference measurements are on the home page of the International Color Consortium at www.color.org.
If you can't figure it out, post to the Apple ColorSync Users List. This is properly speaking the core community of the International Color Consortium, since the International Color Consortium was first called the ColorSync Consortium, and since the ICC Specification, now ISO 15076, is the file format of Apple ColorSync 2.0.
Hope this helps,
Henrik Holmegaard