I don't think that many out there can talk about their real life experiences with PDF/X-4 since the standard hasn't been officially published yet.
What one can talk about is whether maintaining content at the highest level of abstraction will cause improvement or deterioration in quality of printing and in the lives of those involved with prepress and printing.
The fact is that any print service provider that requires their customers to pre-flatten any transparency is not really avoiding problems, but rather causing problems. In order to properly pre-flatten live transparency, one must know the resolution of the device the content is being imaged to as well as its color space. Who is more likely to know this information and how to apply it, the
creative professional or the
print professional? Any PDF file created with pre-flattened transparency is by definition highly device-dependent in terms of resolution and color space. Such PDF files are difficult if not impossible to search and/or apply touch-up operations to. Yes, it is true that for older pre-press workflows that don't support PDF 1.4 and above, having the customer flatten the transparency saves the print service provider one step. On the other hand, although the print service provider can blame the customer for problems caused by faulty customer transparency flattening all he wants, the fact is that at the end of the day, the customer will not be satisfied, the print service provider will need to fix things and reprint at no extra charge, and what could have been a profitable job ends up resulting in a loss!
Under the new workflows, the customer provides PDF at the highest level of abstraction. RGB images are left as-is with their ICC profiles. Transparency is left "live." The print service provider then has two choices:
(1) If they have a reasonably-recent vintage PDF workflow system that has been properly maintained (software updates applied) over the years using either Adobe PostScript 3 or the Adobe PDF Print Engine technology, then these color-managed PDF files with live transparency should simply work!
(2) If they have ancient RIP software that at least conforms to the PostScript language level 2 specification, the print service provider can always successfully "print" such color-managed PDF files with live transparency to such RIPs via Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional. Such "printing" requires the print service provider to understand how to use Acrobat, but then again, the print service provider is more likely to be able to do this successfully than would a creative professional customer.
We do have experience in this area. I have been giving talks on these topics for five years at Creo (now Kodak) user conferences. The audience (all printers with ink under their fingernails) was at first skeptical. The good news is that what I hear from attendees at my talks when we return the next year is that my advise vis-a-vis maintaining content at the highest level of abstraction (ICC profile tagged images in their original RGB color spaces and live transparency) does yield a more streamlined workflow for both them and their customers with correct results.
There are of course,
ifs, ands, and
buts to this. Obviously, GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) always applies. No matter what the print service provider does, if the creative professional customer abuses use of transparency, the results will reflect that. But that is true of everything. Furthermore, these workflows don't work if the print service provider has a wonderfully up-to-date workflow system (such as Prinergy 4) but plugs in a popular OPI system that under-the-covers converts all PDF to PostScript language level 1 via an ancient version of GhostScript (throwing away all transparency operators and color profiling), does its "thing," and the converts the resultant PostScript back to PDF via the same ancient version of GhostScript! We call this type of workflow
PDF Interruptus! (By the way, I did not make up this example.)
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