Reply To: PDF to an office printer: colour and greyscale

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.