🚀 go-pugleaf

Glad that worked for you! I used to get lots of PM files with White set to OP. InDesign nags at you when you try to overprint white, so we don't see it as often as we used to. I do still get quite a few files saved out of AI with OP White. My operators and I need to be able to see those problems when we're getting files ready to print. Whenever you're designing for print, I recommend that you leave Overprint Preview turned on in all your apps. You wouldn't have noticed the problem if the preview wasn't screwed up in Acrobat--it might not have been caught until you received a proof. Or later, after the job had been printed and bound. Never a fun situation.

Designers never really had to worry about stuff like that in the '90s. One of the realities of modern production workflows is that the designer/production artist is chiefly responsible for catching and fixing all prepress errors. In theory, at least. Back in the good/bad old days, designers mocked up designs in Quark or PageMaker, packaged up all their source files along with detailed instructions for the prepress techs, and shipped it all off to the printer on 44MB SyQuest disks. The EPP techs typically went through the files with a fine-toothed comb, fixing everything obsessively. In theory, all that should now be done before the job is submitted for print. In reality, only a depressingly small portion of many shops' customers are competent to do that. We do lots of training and tutorials, but we still end up having to do fix lots of stuff. Only now we do lots of surgery on PDF files using PitStop and other tools, in addition to working with native files. Add in a steady stream of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Publisher files, along with odd formats like Apple Pages (which makes abysmal PDF, in my experience) and OpenOffice Writer (which seems to produce pretty clean PostScript), and you have an average day in the life of a modern prepress tech.