Oh, woe! Win Corel to Mac output

[Jeece]

Hello there... First post in this forum. I discovered this place about two months ago, I've read some posts and found out some valuable infos during this time... This message is not much a cry for help as it is a rant, but any suggestions/tips would be welcome of course.

I work in a small printshop (4 employees, including the boss) as a graphic designer. Our press is a 2 color Hamada, but with only 1 blanket (offset cylinder?) for both colors. This means the colors must not overlap at all (or not much), else it calls for a big mess. Also, we can't do 4 colors real process. Needless to say, multichannel mode is almost all I use in Photoshop.

Now we have a recurring customer (the City Hall) that now designs it's own booklet (4 issue/year, 4 or 8 pages) in-house. We used to do it, but they thought it'd be cheaper to have a secretary design it, and us just printing it. Hey, I'm not dissing secretaries, but to each his/her job*. She uses Corel on a PC. We run on a Mac, so we can't read pure Corel files.

Last time she included a PDF on the CD along the Corel files, but adios spot colors! (unless there's a way to save them in the file...) I opened the PDF file in Photoshop and multichanneled the heck out of the 8 pages of this CMYK file. Converting CMYK to 4 color spot, I don't wanna do it again.

This time, knowing a new booklet was coming, I tried to find a better solution. I called the City Hall and guided her while she exported the file. I found out Corel could export in EPS. Same thing, spots weren't saved, all I saw when I opened the file was CMYK. I also lose all existing margins when I open it in Photoshop. I must process each page individually, and have to align them all by eye. I went to the City Hall, witnessed the original Corel file's spot colors (it was nicely done, plus it was only 2 colors this time!). Re-saved the files in PDF and EPS, but nothing changed on my side. Still CMYK.

I'm thinking of asking her to send separated files (I dunno if it can be donewith Corel), you know, 1 file per color...

So, what would be your workflow to convert a Corel file with spot colors to something a Mac can print in separation? We have Adobe Suite and Quark 5.

*note* Try explaining a normal person (not working in DTP ) that the color they see on screen isn't the same that come out the press. Also, that choosing only 2 swatches (in CMYK) doesn't count as a 2 color job. I could't get her understand the bleed though... and how to leave a bigger margin on one side for the grippers.