WORD to PDF

[mattbeals]

The preflight tools in Acrobat are Callas tools. Callas pdfToolbox has more functions than Acrobat does. Think of Acrobat's preflight and corrections as the "light version". That's not to say the functions in Acrobat have crippled functionality. But pdfToolbox simply has more to offer being the official and maintained product. I don't know how ofter then preflight and prepress functions in Acrobat get updated when Acrobat gets an update. But pdfToolbox is definitely updated on a very regular basis and has many more functions than Acrobat itself does for our purposes.

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Same difference, it's a GDI based product. Works great on RGB files regardless where they come from.

My point was that as Word is RGB based, there was no Publisher CMYK conversion or colour builds taking place or being used.

Acrobat Pro was creating correct seps from the RGB data, solid K text and the red text was 100m100y.


Stephen Marsh

 

[Stephen Marsh]

The preflight tools in Acrobat are Callas tools. Callas pdfToolbox has more functions than Acrobat does. Think of Acrobat's preflight and corrections as the "light version". That's not to say the functions in Acrobat have crippled functionality. But pdfToolbox simply has more to offer being the official and maintained product. I don't know how ofter then preflight and prepress functions in Acrobat get updated when Acrobat gets an update. But pdfToolbox is definitely updated on a very regular basis and has many more functions than Acrobat itself does for our purposes.

I did not know this, I presumed that these were Adobe technologies, rather than being licensed from another company.

So again, what need is there to "convert" these elements to 100% K only when an Adobe workflow will create seps with 100% K text?


Stephen Marsh

 

[mattbeals]

Word uses Windows GDI, the engine Windows uses to display/create objects on screen or on a printer. Windows GDI uses sRGB as its color space. Publisher has the ability to convert the publication to CMYK (using an Agfa SWOP ICC profile). If I recall correctly Publisher is using the perceptual rendering intent for the conversion. Acrobat is smart enough to convert RGB gray/black objects to black only. pdfToolbox takes that a bit further in its conversion process by allowing you to specify UCR, GCR, or UCR & GCR for separating images and vector objects. You can choose to convert images with UCR, GCR or both as well as defining the same parameters for vector objects. Simply put you get more tools, more logic, more flexibility. You may not need anything more than what Acrobat Pro has. But if you do and you are already using Adobe's tools then Callas is a very neat fit and natural next step.

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Thanks for expanding on that Matt, so there is no explicit need - one just has more options. Now I understand where you are coming from, cheers!

Stephen Marsh

 

[leonardr]

The preflight tools in Acrobat are Callas tools. Callas pdfToolbox has more functions than Acrobat does. Think of Acrobat's preflight and corrections as the "light version". That's not to say the functions in Acrobat have crippled functionality. But pdfToolbox simply has more to offer being the official and maintained product.

Unfortunately (for you), Matt, its not that simple.

It is true that there are differences between Acrobat Preflight and the Callas tools - in many cases by design. However, there are also differences between the various editions of the Callas tools - for example, their plugins offers different functionality than their stand-alone and server editions. This is because Acrobat provides both Preflight and the plugin versions of pdfToolbox some extra features that are NOT available when running stand-alone. Some of these features have been duplicated by Callas - but NOT using Adobe technology - and others have not.

So you can NOT paint this comparison with as simple a brush as you do.

Leonard

 

[mattbeals]

What is different in the plug-in version from the stand alone version? There are functions in the Server/CLI/SDK that aren't available in the plug-in or stand alone version, like creating an EPS, PostScript, PNG, or JPEG. But the majority of functions are included across all the versions. It's true that Callas has their own implementation of tools available in Acrobat.

 

[andyt]

Hi Matt,

I have downloaded an evaluation copy of pdfToolbox 4 and am trying to convert a specific CMYK value into a different CMYK value is this possible?

Reason is I'm trying to produce a two colour pdf from Word, e.g 0C 100M 0Y 100K, so a 4 colour file but only using 2 of the plates.

I'm using a Mac and Acrobat 9 pro

Thanks
Andy

 

[mattbeals]

Should be possible yes. Send me the file so I can see what it looks like.

 

[andyt]

Sorry Matt, unable to send files out, could you point me in the right direction within pdfToolbox?

I've had a good dig around and found Map color with specified color values from the Profiles and Fixups menu but wasn't sure how to add the CMYK values in.

When you create PDFs from Word using the "Create Adobe PDF" button that Acrobat installs there (assuming Word for Windows)

Leonard

On a separate issue, is this 'Create Adobe PDF' function available for the Mac version of Word?

 

[mattbeals]

Try this video:
Created by Camtasia Studio 6

You have to tell pdfToolbox what color space to pick up the colors from and how you want to input the selection values. You can use decimal values or percentages. In this case I selected a color of 98%, 2%, 2% in RGB and told it to include intermediate values. That colors themselves were 98.7, 2.7 and 2.7. The other option I added was a plus/minus value of 2% to make sure I grab any colors that were close. For the destination color I had to define an RGB value of 0%, 100%, 0% ( or in decimal 0, 1.0, 0). The last parameter that I used was what objects to apply it to. In this case I chose "all images". All of the items that appear in that list are "inspectors" that you can create. So if you have a very specific item you want to select and modify the color of you would write an inspector that would select that object. When you tell it to apply to "my specific check" the change only applies to the objects selected by the check. You can add more map color functions by hitting the "plus" button.

 

[aldusmanutius]

Check out the nifty Acrobat plug-in: Quite a Bag of Tricks. Quite at Home. Aside from color conversions, it does lots of other things.

 

[prepression]

Dear Forum,

Does anybody know of a good method to get a 4 colour PDF (PDF/X-1a) with single color black text from WORD.

Or is there a third-party plug-in for Word / Acrobat Pro that will do this job ?

Many Thanks,

Nick.

Try reflowing the text into InDesign. Why anyone would want to image a graphics document in Word is beyond me.