Greyscale PDFs in Quark separating into cmyk

[ajacksonlv]

I am using Quark 5 and Acrobat 4. When we import a greyscale PDF into Quark and then print the document with spot color separations (colors are not part of the PDF, they are spot colors in headlines, etc.) the PDFs are separating into CMYK plates. I can't for the life of me figure out how to make a greyscale PDF stay on a black plate only. Also, many people send us color PDFs which we need to convert to greyscale since we are printing a 2 color newsletter. Is there an easy way to convert the PDF to greyscale?

 

[RyanPace]

I would suggest getting "Pitstop" from Enfocus. We receive a lot of pdf files from customers that we place into quark for imposition purposes. Pitstop allows editing of pdfs. Such as converting images to grayscale, CMYK etc. It has more features than I could go into here. I would guess that the pdf you are using may not be true grayscale and only "looks" grayscale. Pitstop will allow you to preflight all pdfs and correct.

The only problem we encounter with placing pdfs into quark, is that quark will not recognize spot colors from a pdf.

 

[popthequark]

I have found that same issue with color .eps's, what I did was convert everything into tif's. I have not had a problem since I did that. I also convert all my pdf's as well. I found that a lot of companies do not know how to use acrobat corretly and do not embed their fonts which cause other problems down the road for me.

 

[brieric]

I think pdfs by nature work in either cmyk or rgb modes. I would consider rasterizing them into tiffs.

 

[Chadoe]

Definately convert the PDFs to another format, be it Tiff or EPS. Then you can assure yourself that the images are grayscale. I use Illustrator if I need to keep the vector and type items editible or Photoshop if all I need is a raster file.

The devil is in the details! Make sure that however you export/save the converted file that the color names are identical to the colors used in the Quark file. Sometimes all it takes is an extra space or minor spelling difference in the color name to create an unintentional 'spot' color.

Whatever you end up doing, try to create a workflow or process that everybody can use, including your repeat customers. Make it easy for them, prove you have the skills and knowledge and they will come back with more jobs!

Hope this helps.
Chadoe