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[Damo77]

Hi everyone,

An acquaintance of mine produces a tiny regional newspaper (barely more than a newsletter, really), and fumbles along with Pagemaker 7, Photoshop 5.5 and Acrobat 5. I help her out wherever I can, but only by phone (she lives a few hours away), and only from memory, because I haven't used those programs for quite a few years.

Mostly she designs the newspaper's ads herself directly in Pagemaker, but now and again she gets a PDF supplied to her. From memory, I don't think PM7 can place PDFs, so she just rasterises the PDF in Photoshop and places it as a jpeg. I know, I know, it hurts me too. Originally she was only converting at 72ppi, so fortunately I showed her how to up the res.

I know that if she opens a PDF in Acrobat 5, she can save it as an EPS, which Pagemaker can recognise, so that will fix the rasterisation problem. However, if the document contains anything other than CMYK colours, it's going to give her grief at output time.

So, two questions:

1. With Acrobat 5, how do you check if a PDF is in CMYK?

2. If the PDF contains RGB or spot colours, can anyone remember if Acrobat 5 has a "convert to CMYK" function? Or is there another solution? Maybe save the PDF as a postscript, and re-distill it? If so, what are the pitfalls? I need to keep this as absolutely simple as possible, or she'll just throw up her hands and go back to rasterising.

Thanks for any advice.