1. What is the best way to get VFP report data, to a commercial print-house for colour printing?
2. Are their any Publishing packages that can easily import VFP fields and memo fields etc, with the same or better degree of control, almost as the VFP report writer does, and feature 4-colour separation.

I want to produce a colour catalogue of products, which will be about 30 pages long. Each page will have about 12 colour pictures of products, with Partno and Item name and Description (memo). Jpeg images are stored in a separate file, with the path stored in the Pic field.

I have a complex VFP6 report (3 column) which is able to print out the catalogue in the desired format. Some products do not have descriptions, and others do not have pictures. The report takes care of everything. If I add products to the table later, or change/add descriptions, etc, when I reprint the report, all the items slot in to their correct places. I never have to worry about the layout of each page. It just flows out.

The problem is I will need to get a file to the commercial print house, that they are able to use. I can print to a PDF file. However our print-house says they cannot get the required 4-colour separations from a PDF file. (They need this to be able to print a production run of colour catalogues)

I have recently made a small brochure using MSFT Publisher 2000. Each page was done manually from scratch. The MSPUB file size for one page was approx 8 MB. The print-house was happy with this file as they were able to get their colour separations from this file.

However I noticed that one foxpro report page, printed to a PDF file was only 1 MB in size.
I am hoping that possibly the PDF file can be opened in another package such as Quark Express, which the print-house uses, and then possible the colour separation can be done. However I feel that the small 1 MB per page PDF file may somehow loose quality or definition? (The MSPUB equivalent page being 8 MB) Can this be done?

Any experience or ideas in this regard would be greatly appreciated.


Regards