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by Molly Joss Getting into CTP can be a learning experience, as panelists at the BookTech '99 session "CTP Part Two: Economic Issues Roundtable" explained. Session speakers, who shared their experiences in detail, included --Jerry Charlton, director of customer technical services, Quebecor Books, Kingsport, TN --Deborah Jones, senior production manager, McGraw-Hill, School Division, New York City --Craig Yolitz, director, prepress department, the West Group, Eagan, MN --Mark M. Krahforst, manufacturing manager, Rodale Press Overall, panelists described the experience of venturing into CTP as a positive one. As speakers described their experiences, a unifying pattern emerged -- each company had moved slowly into it as

Maybe we have an answer to all our prepress problems. It's called PDF. That's short for Portable Document Format. It's Adobe's file format. It's not difficult to grasp the basic principles of what PDF is all about. But it takes more than the page I have here, so please go read our related stories, then come back. All done? Good. (OK, for those of you who hate to flip pages, you should at least know that a PDF file can be made from a PostScript file. PostScript is the final format of a file made with Adobe's PageMaker or Illustrator programs and Quark's QuarkXPress, among others.) So, you