Grayscale PDFs

[Steve Rickaby]

At 06:18 -0800 28/11/06, Dov Isaacs wrote:

>Steve,
>
>I think that you are confusing two separate facilities, the "Ink Manager" and the "Convert Colors" facility.

That is quite possible: I only had a short time to try out Acrobat 8 Pro. Another FrameUsers contributor had pointed me at the ink manager after seeing n 8 Pro demo, which is why I was concentrating on it.

>The "Ink Manager" can be used to alias spot colors and/or to cause spot colors to be printed as process. Given that FrameMaker Windows has no ability to natively output spot colors :-(  the Ink Manager is somewhat useless with regards to FrameMaker output.

But not on Mac, perhaps? ;-)

> And yes, settings done with the Ink Manager for a PDF file are not persistent (they don't "stay" with the PDF file if it is saved). They exist only as long as the PDF file is open.

Thanks for the confirmation.

>The "Convert Colors" facility is a totally separate beast. It allows colors to be actually changed such as RGB to CMYK using ICC profiles (not the dumb PostScript RGB to CMYK conversion) or RGB (or CMYK) to grayscale. The changes made with this facility are preserved if you then save the PDF file.

Right. I shall return to the demo version and work some more with it.

>"Adobe UK Support" either didn't understand what you were trying to find out or gave you the wrong answer or both. Sorry!

No problem. It's really quite hard to get complex technical issues over in a short phone call, especially when you're discussing completely new features in an application, and you're both under pressure. I could tell that the guy at the other end was thrashing his tech database quite hard.

-- 
Steve