I wonder where the fuzziness comes into the process at for digital printing. Obviously a printer requires that you rasterize the text before it can do anything, so who's messing up the raster? Do publishers send degraded images to printers, or are they doing it themselves?
> Do publishers send degraded images to printers, or are they doing it themselves?
Yes. To both.
When I worked at a printer (posters, magazines, and low yield books), often times we would receive shoddy rasters that just did not have the quality necessary for the print, but because of deadlines we would be asked to make do. (Usually because the client didn't want to drive to us to transfer 8Gb of PDFs).
Other times we'd get vectors and do the conversion ourselves, starting the run with something high quality, but partway through a problem would be spotted (like a typo) and someone with less experience would be asked to fix it, and we'd end up with a bad raster again.
Sometimes there would be software incompatibilities at our end, and we'd be unable to produce a raster to our standard, but the client wouldn't care.
Very rarely we'd have hardware problems in etching the plates that would produce low-fidelity prints, but it would happen, and could be missed on inspection.
