Pdf/x

[Slingshot]

Hi everybody,
I'm going to expose my ignorance here, but I was wondering if anybody could explain to me what pdf/x format means and why I should want it. I mean, I get that it's supposed to be some kind of standard, but what does that mean? How is it superior to a regular PDF? Does that mean I can rely on it to open accurately in any software (regardless of version) that supports this format?

Sorry for my ignorance, people. I live in a small town in northern Canada (it's not the end of the Earth, but you can see it from here...). Traditionally, my clients haven't been that worried about things like colour accuracy (as long as it looks good and it's close...), but now I'm starting to land some bigger fish and they're pickier about these things.

Thanks in advance,
Dean.

[steve.ledger]

Hi Dean,

Wiki has some info about the eXtended features of PDFx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/X

Also some more here:

http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/f...dd000124.shtml

[Slingshot]

Thanks for the info, Sledger, but I guess what I really want to know is what it means in practice. I don't own InDesign or Quark, so right now, to avoid any hassles, I only deal with printers that run PC's. All the PC based printers in my town use CorelDraw, so typically I create my artwork in Extreme, export anything iffy as a tiff, and import it into Corel. However, if the pdf/x format imports reliably into InDesign and Quark (and heaven forbid without cross-platform issues) then perhaps I could shop around a bit more and save a little cash.

Thanks again for your response.
Dean.

[Albacore]

I use InDesign CS3 and Place PDF's that I have made in XPro quite reliably so long as there is not text involved where we still have problems with certain letters. I have not yet used Pro 5 yet with PDF/X-3 which includes transparencies with text above which I will deal with when required. I think I will still export only graphics and use layers in InDesign to place the text. What I can see so far and I have only done two newsletters in XPro 5 which were sent to the print shop that both were reliable but these were fairly simple. The newsletter were 2 col. occasional graphics in frames, with front page having headers and footers, with the rest just having footers. Checked both in Freehand MX because it handles multi pages everything looked fine then sent to printers. Only one has been printed so far with no complaints from print shop. If you are going to use XPro for this do have another programme for checking as I have been caught out once in XPro 4 when the text flow went onto another col. taking the text from one col. into the other. In this case it was important as it was describing an Advantage of a process taking it to a Disadvantage col.