The problem is that most people that choose to use Publisher *don't* know
what they're doing.
I get 4-5 Publisher PDFs a week (out of 1200+), it's usually worth the mild
irritation to just fix them when they arrive. If it's really borked,
obviously, I'll reject it.
OP: People use it because they already have it (came with their Office Pro),
and MS leads them to believe it's a legit solution for in-house print
design.
I remember when it first came out, I guess it was free to printers &
even came with a little kit to promote it, including a label that said
'we accept Publisher files here'.
Someone in this group said he put that sign on his garbage can!
Did M$ really think they were going to take over, or even take a small
bite out of the DTP world?
Is that a rhetorical question?
;-)
Joking aside, if I may paraphrase the old adage about bad workmen and
tools it's been my experience that a *good* workman can get good results
from what others may consider a *bad* tool and, of course, vice versa.
But in the case of Microsoft Pubslasher that is something of a rarity
as, almost by definition, anyone using it is likely to be several slugs
short of the full casting stick.
Not that it matters a rap as we routinely get the same crap PDF's from
folk using InDesign and Quirk Depress. Indeed, we receive an ad only
this morning which had been created in Illustrator CS2 containing mostly
raster data (photos). Clearly the muppet who created it believes that
Illy is *THE* hammer for all nails!
;-)
--
Derek Tree
All RGB of course, had to convert to CMYK with Pitsop, the rip (Brisque
5.1) choked on the converted PDF and on Postscript generated from it.
Ended up having to print the 128 page PDF to Postscript files with a
small number of pages in each, distill these using our house standard
job options and rip the resulting PDFs
Took 8 hours longer than I would normally allow for a job of this size.
However, I must admit, i have had one or two Publisher jobs, supplied as
native files, go through the rip like a greased pig when printing CMYK
output from Publisher 2003.
YMMV
Mike