Sanity check please - do the greyscale pages in this PDF contain any colour (CMYK) info?

[bcr]

Folks,

I'm troubleshooting our office print recharging system (equitrac), and I downloaded some BW/Colour test pages and compiled them into a PDF for testing, which in principle contains 5 BW and 5 colour pages.

Notes:
- greyscale pages of the file give colour clicks when printed through equitrac & ricoh driver on Remote Desktop Server (RDS), despite selecting "gray reproduction: black/gray by K-strong UCR" in the Ricoh driver, which used to work for auto b/w colour split on office documents.
- printing outside of equitrac & RDS on a local workstation, through either Fiery or Ricoh controller driver, it correctly splits the greyscale and colour pages.

So - I'm not sure if something is amiss with the config of equitrac, windows server for the RDS etc. But it would be very helpful if anyone could give me chapter and verse on whether the greyscale pages in this PDF do contain any colour information? And if you could give me a tip on how to check that myself, i'd be very grateful.

 

[Macmann]

Folks,

I'm troubleshooting our office print recharging system (equitrac), and I downloaded some BW/Colour test pages and compiled them into a PDF for testing, which in principle contains 5 BW and 5 colour pages.

Notes:
- greyscale pages of the file give colour clicks when printed through equitrac & ricoh driver on Remote Desktop Server (RDS), despite selecting "gray reproduction: black/gray by K-strong UCR" in the Ricoh driver, which used to work for auto b/w colour split on office documents.
- printing outside of equitrac & RDS on a local workstation, through either Fiery or Ricoh controller driver, it correctly splits the greyscale and colour pages.

So - I'm not sure if something is amiss with the config of equitrac, windows server for the RDS etc. But it would be very helpful if anyone could give me chapter and verse on whether the greyscale pages in this PDF do contain any colour information? And if you could give me a tip on how to check that myself, i'd be very grateful.

I used Output Preview in the Print Production tool of Acrobat DC. The greyscale images are indeed black only. That being said, if these pages are part of a file that contains CMYK data I'm assuming the clicks are based on the file as a whole and not actively searching the file for black-only pages and reducing the click charge accordingly. Try sending the greyscale images by themselves to see if you get color clicks. This may warrant a call to Ricoh if you feel you're being charged inappropriately.

 

[bcr]

I used Output Preview in the Print Production tool of Acrobat DC. The greyscale images are indeed black only. That being said, if these pages are part of a file that contains CMYK data I'm assuming the clicks are based on the file as a whole and not actively searching the file for black-only pages and reducing the click charge accordingly. Try sending the greyscale images by themselves to see if you get color clicks. This may warrant a call to Ricoh if you feel you're being charged inappropriately.

thank you!

the driver is supposed to ensure that greyscale stuff is only printed using K and not CMY, on a per-page level. It's working on the driver outside of the RDS. But it seems to have stopped working on the driver used on the RDS with equitrac. Will have to place a service call indeed.

 

[[email protected]]

Folks,

I'm troubleshooting our office print recharging system (equitrac), and I downloaded some BW/Colour test pages and compiled them into a PDF for testing, which in principle contains 5 BW and 5 colour pages.

Notes:
- greyscale pages of the file give colour clicks when printed through equitrac & ricoh driver on Remote Desktop Server (RDS), despite selecting "gray reproduction: black/gray by K-strong UCR" in the Ricoh driver, which used to work for auto b/w colour split on office documents.
- printing outside of equitrac & RDS on a local workstation, through either Fiery or Ricoh controller driver, it correctly splits the greyscale and colour pages.

So - I'm not sure if something is amiss with the config of equitrac, windows server for the RDS etc. But it would be very helpful if anyone could give me chapter and verse on whether the greyscale pages in this PDF do contain any colour information? And if you could give me a tip on how to check that myself, i'd be very grateful.

Hello bcr, I opened this PDF in Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional (I'm at home) and looked at it, but I deleted the last five colour pages, leaving only the black pages.
I opened OUTPUT PREVIEW with different settings and saw anomalies that I believe means you have colour transparency overprint objects which your RIP is seeing as colour.
Have a look at the results I saw.

 

[bcr]

Hello bcr, I opened this PDF in Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional (I'm at home) and looked at it, but I deleted the last five colour pages, leaving only the black pages.
I opened OUTPUT PREVIEW with different settings and saw anomalies that I believe means you have colour transparency overprint objects which your RIP is seeing as colour.
Have a look at the results I saw.

thanks Anthony!