Yes, you can satisfy all of the typical requirements of a commercial print shop, including high resolution images, CMYK colors and embedded fonts. It’s worth checking with your print shop what they require.

At present, iStudio Publisher creates PDF files using Mac OS X’s inbuilt services. It provides no specific options or settings for PDF processing, but you can optionally add your own PDF processing using Mac OS X’s Quartz filters. We are considering adding support for PDF settings in the future. That’s not to say iStudio Publisher creates poor quality PDFs! In fact, we’ve made several design choices within our PDF creation process to produce PDFs suitable for high quality printing.

Digital images are embedded in iStudio Publisher document (.ispx) files in their original formats. Exporting as a PDF also embeds the original format images in the PDF file at their original resolution and compression level, ensuring there’s no loss of image quality. You do need to start off with images of adequate resolution and quality.

iStudio Publisher can be used as part of a color-managed workflow. Document images and other colored document artifacts (lines, fills, text, etc) are all tagged with ICC profiles, which are stored in iStudio Publisher document files and transferred to exported PDFs. ICC profiles are color profiles, which can be changed during document editing. Some printers may require colors to be set to CMYK. More information about CMYK Colors.

iStudio Publisher creates PDF files with font subsets embedded, which ensures all font information remains available for viewing on other computers even if they don’t have your document’s fonts installed. Embedding font subsets involves only including the individual font glyphs (characters) that are actually used in your document rather than embedding complete fonts; it helps to minimize the PDF file size. iStudio Publisher controls and sets the position of each and every character in the PDF rather than relying on the use of default PDF layout algorithms, so you can also be sure your page layout will be faithfully reproduced.