[Scribus] Bleed and 1.3.4, again.

[Craig Ringer]

John R. Culleton wrote:

> Oh yes, the artwork on the cover will be from a 72 dpi image, and not 
> a 300 dpi image. It seems the file was too big to mail in hi res to 
> the designer and the author couldn't/wouldn't handle either ftp or 
> burning a disk.

I've seen sales reps visit customer premises before in order to collect
artwork that they have proved themselves incapable of delivering. I've
even gone along a few times to personally convert $WERID_FORMAT to
something we can (hopefully) use on site using the customer's machines,
because they have no idea what they're doing.

It amazes me how much work a customer will put into a piece of artwork
for publication without even taking a moment to verify that they're
creating something that can be used. It's like a student deciding that
frogs would be a cool topic to write about, then discovering when they
try to hand the essay in that they were required to write about
distributed termination in concurrent systems. Bewildering.

> This is a classic self inflicted wound on the part 
> of the author.  But according to the rules of commerce the customer 
> is always right. I am glad it wasn't my customer.  

I've faced that one when dealing with advertisers in the newspaper I
work for.

We have refused to print advertiser's work before, because the reader
and other advertisers cannot tell the difference between us doing an
appalling job of printing the ad and the advertiser giving us nothing
useful to work with. Losing the customer might be worth it if the damage
they do crying about how "incompetent" and "horrible" we are is less
than the damage done by printing their awful crud.

We used to redesign such ads for free as a last resort, but found that
advertisers would exploit that by providing unusable artwork then
stalling until the last minute in the expectation that when we gave up
trying to get something more than a Word document out of them we'd
redesign it here.

At other times, when we think it'll print OK but aren't sure because
it's well below our spec, we make them confirm in writing that they take
responsibility for the poor quality of their job. Otherwise experience
shows that they'll come at us trying to get their money back for the ad
we "ruined" ... or demand a free reprint by way of reparation.

So ... honestly, no, the customer is not always right. Oh, it's still
"our fault" and we'll definitely refund their money and apologize for
our "inability" to print their job. But we're still not going to print
it no matter how loud they yell.

Sometimes you have more to consider than the one customer, when you're
putting your name on the final work and you want to maintain your
reputation and keep ongoing business. You wouldn't give the customer a
full page ad when they paid for a 1/2 just because they demanded it
loudly enough, after all - there are always limits on the extent to
which customers can be allowed to push things.

--
Craig Ringer