great questions...
here's some info:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=42060
I would really grill the printer as to why the *** he wants a word
file instead of PDF!
He (she) should be able to give you a profile/spec for distilling the
file to get a proper PDF.

Depending on your tools available (version of Acrobat, etc) you can
check the font use, graphics resolution, colorspace, (etc...) in the
output PDF. If the colorspaces are correct and rhe resolutions are
reasonable, it should be printable.

regards
Jay