Simulating Overprint from Illustrator to PDF

Hello Forums,
I am asking here because my searches haven't found anything to answer my question.  I work in a prepress department and we usually send out PDFs to customers via the Adobe PDF printer with simulate overprint on (This is in Mac OSX Leopard).  Reason being is we back everything up with white (but white is on top layer) and have overprinting traps.  Most customers don't have a clue about overprint preview in Adobe Reader and even if they were able to view the PDFs with overprint, if they wanted to print, they would print large white blocks because the printer wouldn't simulate the overprint.  We have one Mac Pro here with Snow Leopard and as I have read, they have gone away with the PDF printer and I am not able to simulate overprint on anything.  I have tried sharing my printer (I am running Leopard), hiding layers, etc. to no avail.  Does anybody have any ideas or resources to point me?  All help is much appreciated.
Jason

Using Distiller is better because you have more control over the settings for the final PDFs and the generated PDFs are way smaller in size, which is largely convenient when you produce dozens of them every day.
Regarding XMP, I actually found an article on Adobe's website that say that you can embed XMP data within a PostScript. You can find it here (www.adobe.com/devnet/xmp/pdfs/xmp_specification.pdf) on page 103 of the document. I'm working on it to make it run and let you the result when tested.
Bruno.

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