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• • February 18, 2011 at 4:22 am #58740
    Rhiannon Miller

    Member

    This problem is not primarily to do with InDesign, but it is related. It's a little different from my usual posts, because it relates not to my job but to the church magazine I help out with. We were fortunate to receive a donation of CS4 recently for me to do this work on; prior to that the magazine was produced in Microsoft Publisher. I can now produce an issue in about a quarter the time it took me in Publisher.

    However, there is a problem. We print the magazine on a big office multipurpose machine (a Konica Minolta Bizhub C252), clever enough to do its own imposition and saddle-stitching, but apparently not clever enough to accept CMYK input. When I give it a PDF in CMYK or RGB colour mode, it makes up the black using a mix of colours. Greyscale works if the whole PDF is black and white, but if there's even one colour page the printer prints the lot in colour, even if both colour spaces are present in the PDF. All the pages in the document are then accounted (and charged for through our lease) as colour.

    When we print files direct from Microsoft Publisher, the printer can discriminate correctly between black and colour pages within the same document. Is there any way, in InDesign or Acrobat, to provide this information to the printer for PDFs?

  • February 18, 2011 at 2:51 pm #58751
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Hi Oriel

    It sounds like this is a smart feature either of the printer or of Publisher. I teach a prepress class, and I don't know of a control in Acrobat 9 for this. (But we don't worry about the issue much, so maybe there's something available we haven't explored. I'd love to hear about it from anyone who knows.)

    I've listed some possibilities below, but I can't be sure of them without knowing your specific printer. If you like, you can send me screen grabs of your print dialog boxes and I might be able to give some clues. Let me know.

    Also, if I'm telling you anything you already know, I apologize in advance. Just skip the parts that you know ;-)

    So here goes:

    I'm assuming you want to run the job in one go and auto-bind, rather than print grey and colour pages separately for later binding. You want the printer to print color for color pages and greyscale for pages with no color elements.

    1. In the short term, there is a print setting in InDesign “Text as Blacks”. It's under the “Output” subpanel. This is available when you print directly from InDesign, rather than ripping to PDF first. It should print only black on text only pages. Whether the printer would count this as a color page on your lease or not, I can't tell.

    (Your printer will need to have a postscript RIP if you're printing directly from InDesign, or you may get jaggies in your prints. Most workgroup printers do have a RIP.)

    2. If you haven't tried outputting your PDF to x1a format, it may force the printer to recognize pure blacks, as it forces all file data to CMYK. But this is just a guess without knowing your printer's brain.

    3. If it's a feature of the printer, you may just need to access the relevant printer-specific feature controls in your print dialog. You're going to be looking for a setting that gives up colour control to the printer.

    (Unfortunately, different printers have different interfaces, so I can't point you in the right direction sight unseen. I put some general directions below:

    In InDesign, printer specific controls will usually be available in the print dialog box under the Printer button.

    In PDF printing, printer specific functions and color control will be in the print dialog and can be accessed by choosing Printer Features in the “Copies and Pages” drop down menu. Unfortunately, there may be a lot of printer features, and they can be confusing.

    Cheers and good luck

    Tom

  • February 22, 2011 at 2:52 am #58766
    Rhiannon Miller

    Member

    Thanks Tom for your suggestions. Your assumptions are correct.

    1. Sadly, printing direct from InDesign isn't an option, or at least not an easy one. The printer is in the church office; I don't have a laptop capable of running InDesign, and the church computer is a PC (the software I have is for Mac).

    2. My print tests suggest that the printer expects RGB input (certainly RGB gives much better results). I've hunted through the driver options and the instruction manual and can't find anything about selecting RGB or CMYK. I've turned on the option in InDesign for outputting black as true black in RGB; I haven't seen the print results yet for that, but I was told yesterday by the chap who printed the PDF I'd sent that the printer was still accounting all pages as colour.

    3. I'm not sure what you mean by 'gives up colour control to the printer'. Looking at the manual, I can only see options for selecting between colour and greyscale output. (There are lots of other options and settings, of course, but that's the only one that seems to have to do with colour.)

    Next time I'm down there I'll have another poke through the print settings and see if I can find anything more.

    Thanks for your help!

  • February 22, 2011 at 7:53 am #58770
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Yes, it's sounding more and more like the split Color/Greyscale print feature is a smart feature of Publisher.

    At this point, my guess is that your best bet is to field your question an Acrobat user group or blog. Full time Acrobat people have a slightly different focus from prepress people and someone there may have a workaround. In the meantime, I'll ask my trade printer if he has anything to add. He outputs a lot of print to digital printers and may be on top of ways to save on colour/grey prints.

    Some notes below re your last post:

    Re 2. RGB/CMYK Yes, many modern digital printers prefer to convert RGB to their ink colours on the fly rather than receive a file converted to CMYK data, so following the printer's instructions is best. Sometimes this is because the printer uses a non-CMYK ink set, but there are other reasons too. So, the short story is that PDF-X1A format is not going to help.

    PDF-X3 format keeps colours as RGB, but I'd guess this is unlikely to solve your problem. But you might want to see if there are any added features in the PDF print dialog when you output to PDF-X3. I'll take a peek to refresh my memory when I get a minute.

    Re. True Black – Using True Black output was a good idea, as it prevents the PDF from adding extra ink from other inkwells to generate rich blacks. The fact that it didn't work says that the decision to account for colour or greyscale pages is being made at a more general level. So I'd be surprised if other detailed output settings in InDesign would make any difference either.

    Re 3. Printer Controls Because a Postscript printer has a self-sufficient set of controls for ripping and printing, and so does PDF, some of those controls are duplicated in the print control panels for PDF and for the printer. Depending on the particular printer, you can choose to let the PDF controls dictate certain print behaviours or let the printer controls handle them. The default for PDF files is generally to take over these functions from the printer.

  • May 26, 2011 at 6:31 am #59701
    Rhiannon Miller

    Member

    I'm resurrecting this old thread to post a workaround that a nice person in a printer forum gave me, just in case anyone else has the same problem. If I make a copy of the PDF and use Acrobat to convert it all to greyscale, and then replace the pages to be printed in colour with their counterparts in the colour version of the file, both the black and the colour pages print as they should. (I found and tried the colour management options in Acrobat, but they made no difference.)

    It would be nice not to spend time doing that, and there's always the possibility of a mistake with this method, but at least I can now get the printer printing and registering black pages correctly!

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