Convert 4c type in PDF with Acrobat?

[MacDaddy]

I get it it's not recommended. But it can work. And if adobe does not recommend why don't they have a fix in PDF distiller to fix it.

[Lukas Engqvist]

The question is should there be a fix for everything or is it better to invest a bit of effort to get people to do things right at the source? I think very few people use distiller now days anyway, and there are tools like calas or pitstop that can handle the problem fairly automatically. You can make all type to grey in an action in Acrobat, and you can use colour converter to fix text.

In short there are tools to fix problems, I don't think that it is just to add too much critique at the problem. Also I am sure that there are some patent issues that don't allow Adobe to incorporate functions that plugin applications deal with (such as converting a range of colours from one colour system when in text objects to a specific colour, black or otherwise). The price for the software is not outrageous, especially not if you compare it to the hours it will save you and the quality you gain. (Pitstop actions can even be incorporated in some workflows such as agfa apogee prepress, and I am sure others)

Think of it this way: if the suite can solve all your problems where would your companys unique selling point be
OP says he has the "usual"... today the usual means having what you need to juggle a PDF, investing in good PDF touchup tools means you can save on having to upgrade all the other software, if you are in a tight spot to keep up with development.

[Dov Isaacs]

I get it it's not recommended. But it can work. And if adobe does not recommend why don't they have a fix in PDF distiller to fix it.

It's not a matter of a fix in Distiller or any other component that creates PDF. As I explicitly noted in one of my earlier posts on this thread, Adobe Illustrator does not support the full PDF imaging models. There are many things you can do in PDF that have no analogy in Illustrator features and as such, Illustrator often either discards such features, does conversions (especially text and color space) that may be harmful to your career, or simply passes content through and doesn't allow any edit (and that's the best of the bad scenarios.

The trouble is that “it can work” is conditional and when it doesn't work, can cause major, expensive problems that might only be caught post-press! There are limited situations where, if you know exactly what is in the PDF file (or part of a PDF file), opening the PDF file (or part of the PDF file such as is done for the object touchup) may be useful, but not always and it may cause serious damage.

Believe me, the easiest thing for me would be to tell you without a care in the world to go ahead and use Illustrator as a general purpose PDF editor. On the other hand, we do have the experience at Adobe of seeing problems that our customers report due to such product misuse!

In terms of Distiller, Distiller itself only produces a subset of the PDF imaging model and is totally irrelevant to this discussion!

- Dov