Most printers will take anything a customer provides even if it makes the end result look laughably horrible. I'll even go so far as to say many sign companies will do exactly the very same thing. I've had lots of belly laughs looking at vehicle wraps featuring low res JPEG art with pixels big enough to support a game of checkers. I could go on and on from there.
A PDF-only policy is going to be very bad for business in terms of off the street traffic from small businesses. The average person doesn't know the difference between a JPEG image, a vector-based EPS file or some cheesy stuff thrown together in Microsoft Publisher. Any print business needs to be able to handle all that garbage, as well as field the quality art files that come in via someone who composed a document in Illustrator or InDesign.
Thankfully, sign manufacturers have certain artwork requirements that just are not flexible. Somebody's dopey web page JPEG is 100% irrelevant for use on a CNC routing table or cutting vinyl. Conversion is required and that doesn't come for free.
I deal with a few different service bureaus for specialty items like laser cutting, grand format billboard face printing, etc. None of them have a PDF-only rule. Every service provider has their own setup. A sign company with both the latest versions of major Adobe applications and Corel will be able to comply with the artwork submission rules of just about any service provider. Some of these companies do have their own peculiar sets of artwork submission rules. One wants files names all lowercase, no spaces, no numerals. Another wants everything in 1" = 1' scale. Some of those demands are a little more time consuming to honor than merely saving an Illustrator layout as a PDF or down to CS3 or CS2.
Um yeah... I suppose I forgot to mention that our PDF requirements are for customers who insist that they are sending us
print-ready artwork and are geared toward those who actually do have some clue about what's what. We will also take a high-res, flattened CMYK TIF image, as well.
But for the rest of the un-washed masses, we actually do accept anything else, as well, but then the process is called design and layout. Nothing, (obviously, to all of us) that comes in pieces -- jpgs, gifs, text, emails, faxes, pieces of paper -- is print-ready, though you'd be surprised at what some customers think.
What I was specifically referring to in the previous post, is that someone, for example, who is submitting an InDesign file that is supposedly ready for print, should have the knowledge and wherewithal to be able to produce an acceptable PDF for press. If they can't, then whatever they submit is subject to design and layout charges according to the deficiencies.
Our PDF policy is not absolute, but gradually, big players like the Regional Health Authority are coming around. For example, the Pharmacy dept at the local regional hospital has interns produce a large poster presentation on some subject as part of their curriculum and we used to get just everything under the sun. But, over time we have educated them and now we get nothing but trouble-free PDFs. They know what to do. We are constantly trying to educate our larger ongoing accounts and they are embracing it because they see the benefits
