Print Ready PDF settings out of Publisher

[slehning]

We have a customer that will be submitting Print Ready PDF files from Publisher.

They will be placing 4/C elements into their documents. I need to come up with some documentation to instruct them on providing us with print ready PDF that convert all 4/C to greyscale.

I am not a Publisher user or expert by any means. So I am looking for some help in this area.

Thanks in Advance

 

[jotterpinky]

I'm not aware of any settings you can use to change color images to grayscale when creating a PDF. What we would normally do in a situation like this is receive the full color PDF from the client, then use an Enfocus Pitstop script to convert all color objects to grayscale. If you do this you'll want to set your color management preferences appropriately in Acrobat for Pitstop.

 

[mattbeals]

Have them create it as normal, pull bleeds off the edge, etc. But don't have them convert the publication to CMYK. Just leave it as RGB. You can use callas pdfToolbox to convert to CMYK and have the black elements come out as device gray, k of cmyk or separation black. pdfToolbox has a specific color conversion mode for Office documents to aid in converting them. I'd be happy to show you if you'd like. I can process a few jobs for you or show you in a quick, 15 minutes or less, webinar.

 

[Marko]

We have a customer that will be submitting Print Ready PDF files from Publisher.

They will be placing 4/C elements into their documents. I need to come up with some documentation to instruct them on providing us with print ready PDF that convert all 4/C to greyscale.

I am not a Publisher user or expert by any means. So I am looking for some help in this area.

Thanks in Advance

Make a preprare sequence in PrintReady to do the conversion to greyscale. Then copy your normal group sequence and change out whats there with the new greyscale one. Hope that helps. The setting for a greyscale prepare are covered in the PrintReady manual and I believe our installer made a sample one.

 

[Shawn]

Hi Marko

You can handle this in two ways. As others have mentioned, you can have them export RGB or CMYK directly out of publisher and then use a third party tool to convert the PDF to Grayscale. You can also try the built in Acrobat Pro tools for this in Advanced - Print Production - Convert Colors. Experiment with the settings until you find what works for you. Depending on how the original file was set up, you may have problems with blacks going gray. In Acrobat 9, checking the "preserve black" checkbox can help.

The other method is to have the customer go into Tools - Commercial Printing - Color Printing and change the color type of the document to single color and then to make sure that black is picked.

That will convert the file to grayscale in Publisher. Depending on profiles and how the original images were saved / embedded you may find that you get muddier conversions with this method, but then again we're talking about something done in Publisher, so the expectation of high quality shouldn't be there.

There are a couple of different ways to get a print-quality PDF out of Publisher. Acrobat has some plug-ins that work fine once they are set up, or you could use a free print-driver based tool like CutePDF.

CutePDF - Create PDF for free, Free PDF Utilities, Edit PDF easily;.

Shawn

 

[John Clifford]

While I don't know of any way of exporting or saving the file as grayscale from Publisher, if you have Acrobat Distiller you can print to distiller and choose Black and white as your color preference in the print dialogue box. OR distill to Postscript with Black and White as the preference. Probably won't be a great conversion, but you'll get grayscale. RGB black text may come out as less than 100% black.

 

[davidmwe]

Convert Microsoft Publisher to InDesign

Convert Microsoft Publisher to InDesign

And do not forget, we, Markzware, also make a Microsoft Publisher to InDesign conversion tool, if you really need to change things on the native file side. It is called PUB2ID and is about to come out with Adobe CS5 support...

PUB2ID v2 (Publisher to InDesign) | Markzware

Friendly Regards,
David Dilling
Markzware

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

If your customer has Acrobat pro, you can make a droplet from an Acrobat preflight profile convering your document to greyscale. That is the easiesr interface. Drop the PDF file on the droplet and it becomes a gray PDF, chances are that they will not have Acrobat though