Cast your minds back ... way back ...

[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.

 

[bgardner]

All I got to say is WOW!!

I didn't even remember PS 5.5 existed. This is a very tough question, and I agree with you that I dont think you can check the color scheme of a document in Acrobat 5, I just dont think it can be done, and Im not sure anyone here has that version to even test it.

I dont think redistilling a PDF is going to help the issue with color conversion.

Is uprgrading to CS3 completely out of the question??? The new Acrobat and Indesign will ha ve her producing a lot more work and a lot faster, if she can learn pagemaker she can pick up on indesign no problem - The word pagemaker makes me sick!!

Good luck!!

 

[Damo77]

I doubt she can afford to upgrade. She just does this as a community service, I don't think she makes much money out of it.

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

Dig dig dig…*look I found acrobat 5 ;P but seems something happened on this computer…*I think it was actually upgraded from another computer, I will have to dig but I think I have PM 7 and PS 5.5 and Acrobat 5 on a computer in the attic.
While I am searching could you find out if it's mac or PC?

 

[buckeye]

I was able to place a version 1.3 and 1.6 pdf in PageMaker 7. See attached snapshot of the PDF Import dialog box.

 

[leonardr]

PageMaker 7 fully supports import of PDF (it does it by conversion of PDF->EPS, FWIW), however if you are concerned about CMYK vs. RGB issues though would still exist. I would like to know why that's an issue though.

Acrobat 5 doesn't support color conversion or preflight. So no, you can't check or fix.

IF she insists of rasterizing through Photoshop, do NOT use JPEG! Remember that JPEG is ONLY for images and thus will cause "artifacting" on any text in the image. Instead, use TIFF - that will give you a MUCH better image and PM will happily import it.

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

I checked, but seems others have answered since

I checked, but seems others have answered since

What I saw was that Acrobat 5 has an option for "Postscript colourmanagement" if I remember right that means LUT's and was very tricky. As also mentioned PM7 did the placement of PDF's. Showing options also letts you choose of the PDF should be converted to level 1 or level 2 compatible, and what page to place etc.

RGB colours can be converted manually by touchup opening images in PS, but can be unstable.

 

[Damo77]

IF she insists of rasterizing through Photoshop, do NOT use JPEG! Remember that JPEG is ONLY for images and thus will cause "artifacting" on any text in the image. Instead, use TIFF - that will give you a MUCH better image and PM will happily import it.

With respect, that's nonsense. A level 10+ jpeg is just as good as a tiff in these circumstances - ie not very.

 

[Damo77]

RGB colours can be converted manually by touchup opening images in PS, but can be unstable.

That's ok for images, but not for other items. AFAIK she doesn't have Illustrator or Freehand, so editing vector components won't be possible.

 

[Damo77]

Well, thanks everyone for the advice about placing pdfs in Pagemaker. I didn't remember that.

Regarding colours, I guess I'll have to help her with her page output, to make sure everything gets converted to CMYK at that stage. That'll be tricky to do over the phone