Thanks to David @ Creo Australia, I spent the afternoon yesterday with the new version of Creo Prinergy, 2.1. It will take an Adobe Acrobat 5.0 PDF (PDF1.4) and flatten the transparency out of InDesign 2.0 in the RIP. This means that as printers install 2.1, you can export Acrobat 5.0 PDFs from InDesign which is way faster and have the RIP do the hard flattening work. Oh yes, it also works with spot colours, too. In many workflows, the ability to late-stage edit a PDF is paramount. With all the transparency features in InDesign 2.0, the flattening does produce complex PDFs that are difficult to edit at a late stage. With Acrobat 5.0 PDFs, the ability to do editing is improved.
One of the new servers as announced yesterday, the Adobe Document Server 5.0, permits PDF to EPS generation on a server. You can feed CMYK high resolution PDFs to the server, and it can feed back CMYK EPSs for placement into QuarkXpress et al.
I recall speaking to an Adobe executive in 2000 about “getting in the server space”. Now we have many!.