Thanks for your insight and information.
I appreciate the limitations of Illustrators PDF editing capabilities (perhaps a bit more now).
In a perfect world, I would take this advice to heart and never deviate, but in the real prepress world I've occupied for the last 20 years or so, at least half of the jobs received are PDFs from any number of sources which either are unprintable as is or need client-requested changes. And in my current packaging position, that percentage is much higher.
There seems to be no alternative but to grit your teeth, hope for the best and open up PDFs in Illustrator under these circumstances.
Thanks again,
Sean
