Query: Word and Acrobat/PageMaker and tables

[Geoff Hart <Geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

(Apologies for crossposting; there's enough nonoverlap in people
and expertise between techwr-l and copyediting-l that I'd like to
gather opinions from both communities.)

I have two questions related to publishing using Word97,
PageMaker, and Acrobat (all under Windows 95):

First off, has anyone successfully used Word and the current
version (4.x?) of Acrobat Distiller to output film on a typesetter?
Apart from the usual problems with experimenting to find the right
image settings for photographs, did you encounter any major
problems? Were you able to do spot-color separations from the
Acrobat file? (I'm aware that Word's color model is incompatible
with offset printing, but was wondering whether it's possible for
typesetting software to recognize the existence of a color other
than black in an Acrobat file created from Word, and then output
that color on its own plate.)

Second, has anyone come up with a good way to import Word
tables into PageMaker? We know how to export Word tables into
PageMaker's table editor ("Adobe Table"), but we lose almost all
the formatting and have to recreate it from scratch; thus, we'd
prefer to use a less painful approach. (Printing the files to disk as
.eps format is one obvious option, but that would be very
cumbersome because it doesn't let us easily do things like
assigning colors to rows of the table or editing text.)

Thanks in advance. I'll summarize to both lists when the responses
start to taper off.

--Geoff Hart @8^{)}     Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

"Though the editor is the author's ally, she should never forget that
she is also the reader's first line of defense."--Shoshanna Green

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