🚀 go-pugleaf

Chris,

The printer is absolutely out of touch and clueless. You must never
open a PDF in Illustrator unless it has been produced by Illustrator
itself using all of the proper settings.

For a two-colour spot job the FM generated PDF can be easily fixed by
PitStopPro (or ColourChameleon for the ps output from FM). If the
printshop isn't pre-flighting PDFs using a tool such as PitStopPro,
they are a throwback to the last century, careless, lazy and
penny-pinching. Find another print vendor.

Were the fonts fuzzy in the PDF that you sent to them? If not, then
the printshop screwed it up (another reason to run away). If they
were, check your settings in the Distiller printer instance (see the
FAQ section and Dov Isaacs posting at the start of this Forum for how
to make good PDFs).

I've done lots of colour work with FM (spot and 4-colour CMYK) and it
can work very well, provided you address the GDI conversion to RGB
issue and you have a printshop that knows how to work with composite
PDF files.