Leonard,
Sorry for the late reply - I've been busy and am just now finding the time to get back to the forum. I bet you were hoping this one was finished.
I (and surely most of us) do sincerely appreciate your interest and help with the issues we have relating to our non-secretarial use of Acrobat Pro. It's nice to have someone who actually works for Adobe to yell at who keeps coming back for more. There's a lot of steam backed up behind the proverbial valve, I suppose, and whichever brave soul from Adobe dares to open it up a bit is probably going to get more of a scorching than they deserve. You're on a hero's quest, Leonard.
And the battle continues...
Fair enough point. I'll probably do that if I start using Acrobat XI more frequently (I'm already using it to convert colors, after it was the only version that didn't screw up a particular PDF). However, I still can't seem to divorce the toolbar from the document window, which means I'll need a bigger monitor to have as many pixels available for the document as I do with Acrobat 7.
I haven't noticed any problems so far, except that clipping paths in certain documents are sometimes ignored. This did bite me once when the customer didn't provide bleed on a page, but there was hidden image behind a clipping path that made it appear to bleed properly in Acrobat 7. If you have any example files that demonstrate incorrect rendering, I'd be happy to take a look.
Allow me to refresh your memory:
http://printplanet.com/forums/adobe/13753-acrobat-8-woes
As stated by others, turning the black ink on and off allows us to see what we're putting on the plates. The most common issues are overprinting black ink versus knocking-out black ink versus rich black (e.g., 60/40/40/100 CMYK) versus black from a CMYK profile, like SWOP's 75/68/67/90. Each variant has its purpose and a very high percentage of what we receive contains all variants on the same page, and sometimes in the same paragraph. I think when designers graduate designer school they are given a special four-sided die they are supposed to roll for every object.
Preflight profiles are far from the panacea they are so often made out to be. There are two primary problems with replacing the viewing of separations with complete reliance upon preflight profiles.
The first is that you cannot have no false positives without a high number of false negatives, and vice-versa. A good example of a false positive is "Warning! There's some black text that is not set to overprint!," but that black text isn't over anything to overprint anyway (white background), so I don't care. My brain doesn't call that a problem when turning the black ink on and off, but a preflight profile will. You could do a fix-up to all those objects, and there's no harm in making that black type over the white background overprint, right? But there would be a problem overprinting black text that is not set to overprint but is set to multiply when it is not on a white background (I do see this quite often).
The second is that we are usually not looking for needles in haystacks - we're wading through needles and hay. Even if preflight profiles for finding black irregularities could correctly identify every single problem and not bother me with a single warning about something that is actually fine, they would not be helpful for many of the jobs I work on. The best and most common example is a publication filled with process color advertisements. I would know before running such a profile which pages have problems - all of them! If one page out of a thousand had an issue, and I had a preflight profile that was perfect and could find that one page, that would be one thing. Reality is quite another.
I bet the ratio of people using assistive technology who actually use the output preview window to everyone else who uses the output preview window is incredibly small (even smaller than the ratio of prepress operators to secretaries). I know code changes aren't always trivial, but how about a "give palette windows focus" preference?
Sorry for the late reply - I've been busy and am just now finding the time to get back to the forum. I bet you were hoping this one was finished.
I (and surely most of us) do sincerely appreciate your interest and help with the issues we have relating to our non-secretarial use of Acrobat Pro. It's nice to have someone who actually works for Adobe to yell at who keeps coming back for more. There's a lot of steam backed up behind the proverbial valve, I suppose, and whichever brave soul from Adobe dares to open it up a bit is probably going to get more of a scorching than they deserve. You're on a hero's quest, Leonard.
And the battle continues...
Fair enough point. I'll probably do that if I start using Acrobat XI more frequently (I'm already using it to convert colors, after it was the only version that didn't screw up a particular PDF). However, I still can't seem to divorce the toolbar from the document window, which means I'll need a bigger monitor to have as many pixels available for the document as I do with Acrobat 7.
I haven't noticed any problems so far, except that clipping paths in certain documents are sometimes ignored. This did bite me once when the customer didn't provide bleed on a page, but there was hidden image behind a clipping path that made it appear to bleed properly in Acrobat 7. If you have any example files that demonstrate incorrect rendering, I'd be happy to take a look.
Allow me to refresh your memory:
http://printplanet.com/forums/adobe/13753-acrobat-8-woes
Because the files we get are very, very dirty.
As stated by others, turning the black ink on and off allows us to see what we're putting on the plates. The most common issues are overprinting black ink versus knocking-out black ink versus rich black (e.g., 60/40/40/100 CMYK) versus black from a CMYK profile, like SWOP's 75/68/67/90. Each variant has its purpose and a very high percentage of what we receive contains all variants on the same page, and sometimes in the same paragraph. I think when designers graduate designer school they are given a special four-sided die they are supposed to roll for every object.
Preflight profiles are far from the panacea they are so often made out to be. There are two primary problems with replacing the viewing of separations with complete reliance upon preflight profiles.
The first is that you cannot have no false positives without a high number of false negatives, and vice-versa. A good example of a false positive is "Warning! There's some black text that is not set to overprint!," but that black text isn't over anything to overprint anyway (white background), so I don't care. My brain doesn't call that a problem when turning the black ink on and off, but a preflight profile will. You could do a fix-up to all those objects, and there's no harm in making that black type over the white background overprint, right? But there would be a problem overprinting black text that is not set to overprint but is set to multiply when it is not on a white background (I do see this quite often).
The second is that we are usually not looking for needles in haystacks - we're wading through needles and hay. Even if preflight profiles for finding black irregularities could correctly identify every single problem and not bother me with a single warning about something that is actually fine, they would not be helpful for many of the jobs I work on. The best and most common example is a publication filled with process color advertisements. I would know before running such a profile which pages have problems - all of them! If one page out of a thousand had an issue, and I had a preflight profile that was perfect and could find that one page, that would be one thing. Reality is quite another.
I bet the ratio of people using assistive technology who actually use the output preview window to everyone else who uses the output preview window is incredibly small (even smaller than the ratio of prepress operators to secretaries
). I know code changes aren't always trivial, but how about a "give palette windows focus" preference?
