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• • March 30, 2012 at 3:58 pm #61912
    ll1324

    Member

    Here's an odd problem…. Have some black text (InDesign's default black swatch), and when printing it to the locally connected injet or laser printer from InDesign CS5, it prints black. BUT if I export it to a PDF, and then have Acrobat print the PDF, it isn't as black, sometimes looks pixelated (like it was sent through the halftone screen).

    I've noticed this same phenomenaon several printers, a Xerox Phaser laser printer, an HP laser printer, a Canon inkjet printer, etc. (All of which are non-postscript printers).

    At first I was wondering if it was the printer changing CMYK to RGB values, but doesn't seem to be, because no matter what the output destination (whether CMYK, RGB, or don't convert), it always comes out pixelated (although with different amounts of black).

    I noticed on the Adobe forums, several other people ran into similar problems (with blacks not being so black, or perhaps pixelated) but nobody seemed to have an answer. Any inspirations (or did I miss something while searching the forum)?

  • April 1, 2012 at 10:51 pm #61928
    Gert Verrept

    Member

    I have the same problem on our OCE printers. Why it happens, no idea. The fix (or workaround), I use pitstop to change black to “device gray” this way:

    – Open the ‘Remap Colors’ Global Change

    – Choose Color from the first dropdown menu

    – Choose User Swatch from the second

    – Click on the color pick Icon

    – Choose the Black Spot Color from the Document Spot Colors

    – Choose color in the dropdown menu under ‘to’

    – Choose Device Gray as color space and 0 as brightness

    – Save and Run the Global Change

    It works fine for us, so maybe you can give it a try.

  • October 22, 2015 at 11:15 am #78919
    ll1324

    Member

    After fiddling around, most of the problem seems to be the printer driver converting from CMYK to RGB.

    The fix that I’ve found (which seems to work pretty good) is to start up Acrobat, and use the convert colors tool to convert it to sRGB.

    This also works with CS6.

  • December 21, 2015 at 8:06 pm #80383
    ll1324

    Member

    Even more fiddling around.

    Sometimes it helps if the “Simulate Overprint” checkbox is checked in the output panel (when exporting or printing), when exporting to sRGB (output conversion) That sometimes does the trick also, but I’m not sure why!

  • January 8, 2016 at 9:03 pm #80650
    Kristi Davis

    Member

    When exporting a file as PDF from Indesign some entire paragraph’s text appear bold when only a few words should be bold. Also some of the text appears to have a white stroke although I’ve checked and there is no stroke and width is zero. The white stroke and entire bold Any paragraph looks fine while in Indesign but not in the exported PDF. Any ideas on how to resolve this issue? Many thanks in advance.

  • December 6, 2016 at 4:09 pm #89160
    ll1324

    Member

    It seems now that a lot of this is because laser printers are expecting RGB values and not CMYK values. K=100 means black, but not rich black. (Note also that “output all blacks as rich black” on preferences sometimes has an effect and sometimes doesn’t depending on various things).

    Instead, convert to RGB colors when exporting in InDesign.

    On the PDF export screen, click the output (on the left hand side) and convert the colors:

    Color Conversion: Convert to Destination
    Destination: sRGB ICE61966-2
    Profile Inclusion Policy: Include Destination

    That has done the trick.

    Some people have used the “Registration” swatch instead of “Black” for everything black, which sort-of does the trick, but don’t do that. If this is ever sent to a printing press, some pre-press worker will be annoyed, because registration swatch is for registration marks on printing presses.

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