I tend to worry more if the printer requests the native file than if they request a PDF. I've had far fewer problems printing from PDFs than I ever did printing from native files. That seems like a bad idea in my opinion, if they want folks using their fonts! In any case, I send PDFs. But I just checked on Adobe's page and they say it's illegal to do so with their fonts, and so I'll assume other companies feel the same. When I worked in prepress (ages ago), we received fonts with every job that was sent in.

You know, I had always thought that it was okay to send fonts to printers solely for printing your own job! The printers certainly instructed you to do so. And yes, I know that 'everyone does it.' That doesn't make it right or legal. You'll be hard pressed to find a font license that allows that. Your job as a designer is to supply TO the printer the correct format, or pay to have them make it right. And everyone that sits in front of a computer with Quark or Indesign, or Illustrator doesn't make you a designer. Just because the designer used the wrong program to create the logo is not a reason to blow off a printer. You have to be able to VIEW OUTLINES and see each and every line, text outlines that you want to be on the finished product.

Just because it looks like a goose and quacks like a goose, doesn't make it a goose. It can't be a pdf or jpg or anything else brought into illustrator and saved as an illustrator file. When you have to send jobs to do decals (for bottles, glass, vehicles, signs) or t-shirts silk screening, or embroidery (for shirts, caps) you MUST have an illustrator or vector file. Recently I started college (a freshman 40 years after graduating high school) majoring in Graphic Design and Web Development (something I've been doing professionally for 40+ years) I have had to trap, add bleed, change to spot color, fix graphics, replace fonts and finagle every type of file you can imagine. I worked at a commercial printer for over 30 years and when you are doing commercial printing, I can agree with that. Don't use a printer that can't open a file in AI.

Ai indesign