Word, PDF, RGB, CMYK problems for a new self publishing author - Help Please

[abc]

Welcome to our world. Unfortunately in CMYK the black text should be CMY 0%, K 100%

 

[rshome123]

Thanks, but surely CMY 0%, K 100% when printed would end up a shade of grey rather than a dark black? I thought the extra CMY inks would be used to 'overprint' and further darken the colour.

 

[Joe]

Thanks again Kyle and abc. Just a quick update - I started a trial of Adobe Acrobat Pro and played around with changing the colourspace in a PDF exported from Word. After much head scratching and research, I eventually managed to change the colourspace within the 'Print Production' options.

I verified the conversion had applied to all objects by inspecting them with the Object Inspector part of Output Preview. The ColourSpace of everything had changed to 'DeviceCMYK', which I assume is correct.

Reassuringly all black text had been converted to a CMYK of [0.75,0.68,0.67,0.902], which I assume is an acceptable representation of Rich Black. Please correct me if I am wrong.

You will see the CMY colors bleeding out of that text with any minor mis-registration of the colors during the press run (high speed presses aren't perfect) so yes that is wrong. As ABC said...it needs to be CMY=0% and K = 100%.

 

[Joe]

Thanks, but surely CMY 0%, K 100% when printed would end up a shade of grey rather than a dark black? I thought the extra CMY inks would be used to 'overprint' and further darken the colour.

Sure if you don't mind your text looking like this in the final printed piece.

 

[gordo]

Thanks, but surely CMY 0%, K 100% when printed would end up a shade of grey rather than a dark black? I thought the extra CMY inks would be used to 'overprint' and further darken the colour.

The visual contrast between the 100% black text and the white paper is sufficient to make the text look very black. You can confirm this by looking at black text in a magazine under a loupe.
Rich black where the other process inks are included is used for larger areas since they don't benefit from the visual contrast.

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Reassuringly all black text had been converted to a CMYK of [0.75,0.68,0.67,0.902], which I assume is an acceptable representation of Rich Black. Please correct me if I am wrong.

As previously noted by others, this is not reassuring to print professionals.

This link will help with clean conversions of RGB black text to K only in Acrobat Pro:

Acrobat Pro – Converting RGB Black PDF Content to CMYK Black


And related links:

Acrobat Pro – Converting CMYK Black PDF Content to RGB
Acrobat Pro – Converting CMYK Black PDF Content to CMYK Black
Acrobat Pro – Preflight Fixup to Convert Rich Black to CMYK Black
Acrobat Pro – Preflight Fixup to Convert Black Tint to Solid Black



Stephen Marsh

 

[rshome123]

Many thanks for the further help abc, Gordo, Stephen. Things are much clearer now.

 

[Slammer]

Slammer, thank you, but the problem concerns a physical book, not Amazon Kindle eBook publishing.

Ah, got it! The wall of text was almost too much to process. Then in that case, everything what the others have said. Having said that if you ask me for my humble opinion I would stick with Kindle.

 

[easiprint]

rshome123. I think maybe for a one off print run you are probably looking far too deep into the technicalities of print and just blurring the lines as much as the cmyk text would be blurred! Digital presses these days can do great things. I'm a UK based printer, and I would suggest you send the files you have to a printer and get a digital proof printed to see what you get. I think you may be happy with the results as they are, or at the very least you will know how much needs doing.

 

[Paul Sherfield]

There are many printers in the UK who can take a PDF from a Word RGB file and use colour server software to convert it to CMYK and ensures things like the black being only black etc.