InDesign PDF to XMF: Pantones coming up as CMYK

[Curtis]

A little background: I have very little knowledge of the actual printing process so try to put answers in as layman terms as possible.

So we do all our work in InDesign with spot Pantone colors. We then send these to our print shop as both a standard PDF and a color separated PDF. Things have always gone smoothly until recently. The print shop has started feeding everything through XMF (whatever that is?) and they are getting back CMYK colors for some of our Pantones which is screwing up their printing process, and causing us to attempt all these crazy work arounds without actually understanding whats causing these problems in the first place.

It seems to have some correlation to importing graphics from Illustrator. Although we do recolor the graphics with Pantone colors in InDesign, it still seems to cause them to come up as CMYK in XMF.

Someone please help.....

[Joe Duffy]

Do you check the pdf yopu supply to the Print Shop in Acrobat prior to sending it?
Look in output preview and turn off the Pantone Spot color, if any color remains, you have a pdf setting error on your end. If the page goes blank, the Print Shop has a rip issue.

[rich apollo]

XMF is Fuji's workflow. Sounds like they could change a couple settings and retain the spot colors.

[Mark Flanders]

Greetings,

If you have your colors defined as "spot" in Indesign, then your CMYK definitions are probably coming from the imported Illustrator files. You have to open them in Illustrator and redefine the colors with the exact same name used in your Indisign file. (Reselecting them in Indesign, and "coloring" them doesn't change a linked or embedded file.) Running preflight should flush out these problems. Good luck!

Mark