Digital Prepress Workers: Mixed Color & Crop Marks - Handling [Registration] black

[urville]

Digital Prepress Workers: Mixed Color & Crop Marks - Handling [Registration] black

Digital prepress workers! I'm looking for you!

If you're not a digital prepress worker, this isn't a slight against offset, it's just that digital print now represents nearly if not over 50% of the market. Yet, digital process prepress workers are still made to do workflow efficiency killing workarounds so the Adobe can continue to preference offset print workflows. Primarily, by not offering digital process workers an option either in "Preferences" for ID wide, or at least in "New Document" dialogs or the "Marks and Bleeds" dialogs in Print or Export windows, for per project optional 100% K over [Registration] black on printer marks or most importantly crop marks.

My hope is that other digital prepress workers have perhaps a post output PDF workflow, Adobe internal sub file editing maybe, a post output the conversion of (specifically) [Registration] black to 100% K that minimizes this necessity to at least as few as steps as possible or, I hope, to as little steps at the offset workflow people get. Please post them here if you have them.

 

[dabob]

I feel your pain . . . but I have a workaround . . . you can create "marks" by specifying a, for example, a .125 inch bleed and then on the master page place 4 black squares maybe 3/32 of an inch square in each corner of the bleed . . . subtract .125 from the outside edges and presto . . black marks . .. . or if you are using fusion to impose you can spec the marks to be black . . .

And IMHO offset still rules the roost . . . here is a quote from a simple google search . ..

In 2017, litho still dominates the world print landscape in terms of the number of pages printed; And by 2022 it will still account for over 70% of the world print output, but much litho print is relatively low-value publication printing – such as newspapers, magazines and directories; which are falling . . .

I have a mixed product shop and while we are running much more digital work now than ever before the quantity of work that is on the litho side by a wide, very wide margin . . . .

 

[urville]

That's where I got the 50% number, and they said it was growing 7% every year. Truths probably in the middle. Heck, we're out quoting offset shops on even the mid-sized runs anymore. People keep switching to those 8 color perfector presses and they seem to be killing shops left and right because they cant feed it.

Honestly, I really appreciate the reply, but that workaround is gonna be a ton of work day to day. We're all digital, as you might be noticing offset jobs are a lower volume of overall jobs compared to digital but they are nice long runs but also tend to be lower margins and carry likewise longer turns, while digital is a volume of smaller shorter run jobs but at higher margins at short turns, most of our work is 1-2 day and that's several thousand piece mailings even. Of course, we only have to run those pieces through one machine, maybe two IF they need stuffing. Hell, we're doing booklets inline at speed (no loss of per minute output) anymore too. At least at all the shops, I have worked. Being all digital, this work around, as well as the CropMarks script, Rhimposition, and page by page acrobat color conversions are a time and productivity sink, ESPECIALLY when it come to the reality of a larger job volume and decreased turn times. This is real money we can feel this costing us.

I feel like if Adobe could add several digital tools elsewhere including preflights, they could add this option. I mean people have been asking for years now and digital certainly isn't going anywhere. I would have preferred to see this over the unnecessary cosmetic changes they just made in the last update.

 

[urville]

I found this in the preflights in Acrobat DC Pro. Now I will have to put every document out to PDF instead of printing directly to the RIP. It does not appear to work on crop marks for some reason in Acrobat XI Pro. However, I can confirm it does work correctly in Acrobat DC Pro. It's the best I think I might find, which is silly and still a lot of unnecessarily lost click cycles.

 

[Stephen Marsh]

I found this in the preflights in Acrobat DC Pro. Now I will have to put every document out to PDF instead of printing directly to the RIP. It does not appear to work on crop marks for some reason in Acrobat XI Pro. However, I can confirm it does work correctly in Acrobat DC Pro. It's the best I think I might find, which is silly and still a lot of unnecessarily lost click cycles.

Yes, there have been documented issues with this feature in various versions of Acrobat Pro over the years.

For greater productivity one could of course use a hot folder based workflow such as Enfocus PitStop Sever, which will watch an input folder and move the automatically corrected files to an output folder (which could be the input hot folder for your DFE/RIP).


Stephen Marsh

 

[Tim-Ellis]

Hello Urville,

We have an Indigo HP5600 and we don't get this problem. We have a Black Only RIP folder and a 4Color RIP folder and some other variations so the operator can control the jobs and avoid extra clicks if someone has been a bit lazy with their tick marks. We also use JLT files that allow us to kill off those unwanted clicks.

So I had a look around and there is a Adobe Acrobat PreFlight Profile Custom Fix Up called Convert Registration Colour to CMYK Black Only.

I've attached a copy of the PreFlight Profile and a screen shot of the settings.

You could add this setting to your current Profile or create a droplet app so that every PDF you need processing can be adjusted.

I did a quick test and it worked but there is some talk on forums of it not working for all files in Acrobat 10.


Oh! --- if you want to do this from InDesign you can with the Find and Replace Dialog Box....


https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1253069


I hope this helps you.

 

[urville]

Hello Urville,

We have an Indigo HP5600 and we don't get this problem. We have a Black Only RIP folder and a 4Color RIP folder and some other variations so the operator can control the jobs and avoid extra clicks if someone has been a bit lazy with their tick marks. We also use JLT files that allow us to kill off those unwanted clicks.

Is that Fiery EX RIP?

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Tim, I believe that with print/PDF export that there is no direct control over the crop and other page marks, they are generated on the fly and use rego/all colour. Then one is forced to deal with them after the file is printed/exported. There is a trick where one can create their own custom marks in InDesign, rather than use the hard wired ones:

https://indesignsecrets.com/creating-custom-printer-marks-in-indesign.php
https://indesignsecrets.com/japanese-and-chinese-crop-marks-for-indesign.php
https://indesignsecrets.com/topic/custom-crop-bleed-marks-in-cs3


Here is an old post where I kicked the ant nest regarding how these marks may be handled by various RIP/DFE settings:

https://printplanet.com/forum/digit...62-can-you-please-test-–-colour-or-mono-click


Stephen Marsh

 

[Tim-Ellis]

Is that Fiery EX RIP?

Hello Urville,

No. The HP Indigo uses an onboard Harlequin RIP.

Do you use Fiery? Could you set up a custom spot colour on your DFE or RIP to convert "All" , "Registration" or "100/100/100/100" to 100% K ?

 

[Tim-Ellis]

Tim, I believe that with print/PDF export that there is no direct control over the crop and other page marks, they are generated on the fly and use rego/all colour. Then one is forced to deal with them after the file is printed/exported.

Ahhhh - Gotcha.

Just the kind of feature I like to avoid.

Ok - so, off the top of my head, one could...

• Print to PDF with the default settings.
• Have that PDF written to a Automator Hot Folder.
• Have Automator pass the PDF through a PreFlight Droplet to amend the tick marks.
• Pass that amended PDF to the RIP
• Open another beer and toast the age of automation.

 

[dabob]

Ahhhh - Gotcha.

Just the kind of feature I like to avoid.

Ok - so, off the top of my head, one could...

• Print to PDF with the default settings.
• Have that PDF written to a Automator Hot Folder.
• Have Automator pass the PDF through a PreFlight Droplet to amend the tick marks.
• Pass that amended PDF to the RIP
• Open another beer and toast the age of automation.

This got me thinkin (and this may be the samething) . . . I looked around and there is a "fixup" in Acrobat DC, "Convert registration color to CMYK black only" run it and the problem is solved . . . working on trying to make it a droplet . . . don't know much about automator either

 

[MailGuru]

This got me thinkin (and this may be the samething) . . . I looked around and there is a "fixup" in Acrobat DC, "Convert registration color to CMYK black only" run it and the problem is solved . . . working on trying to make it a droplet . . . don't know much about automator either

Dabob, I don't understand how converting to CMYK black solves the problem. CMYK black is still a color click. It needs to be converted to K only to get a b&w click (I think?)

 

[dabob]

Dabob, I don't understand how converting to CMYK black solves the problem. CMYK black is still a color click. It needs to be converted to K only to get a b&w click (I think?)

If you look at the "fixs" it does convert it to only K not an rgb black . .. grab a pdf with reg marks then run the registration to CMYK black and then print preview w/black off works great see below

It will only work on the "registration color" - would come in handy for mixed color and bnw work . . .

 

[urville]

He is correct, that preflight does convert to black only, but I cannot for the life of me figure out howe to make a hot folder for DC PRO in Windows 7. I use actions in Acrobat DC PRo all the time, even hot folders for the rips, but I cant seem to find a non convoluted method for DC Pro

 

[dabob]

I didn't make a hot folder, I made a droplet that I can drop multiple files on and have them show up in a folder of my choice . . . not quite as elegant as a hot folder but better off than I was last week . . . and a month ago I had about 100 variable jobs that were color on the front and K on the back . . wish I had known about this then . . . . oh well, live and learn

 

[urville]

A droplet? any chance you have a link to a tutorial?

 

[dabob]

A droplet? any chance you have a link to a tutorial?

I found out how at Lynda.com but adobe has some tutorials on it also pretty easy once you poke around a bit.