Copying with multiple spot color definitions

[Steve Rickaby]

I think I may have accidentally come across a simple fix to the following problem, which tripped me up on a previous job in FrameMaker:

. You are working on a document or book that uses a spot color for both text and graphics

. The final job must print on no more than two plates

. The book uses illustrations prepared in a package like Illustrator

. The name of the spot (for example, Pantone) shade differs between FrameMaker and Illustrator

. This causes the final PDF to contain two plate definitions for the same color, one for the FrameMaker spot color and one for the illustrations, making the final plate count three and not two.

I had battled with this before and not fixed it, so the printer had to alias the two spot plates together. 

If you create a color definition from a Pantone library in FrameMaker and then change its name, the 'Ink Name' field in the color definitions dialog, which is read-only, change=s from the Pantone name to 'None'. I'd assumed - and that perhaps was my error - that this meant that the spot plate would not be output correctly in Ps/PDF.

In fact, if you change the name of the spot color in FrameMaker to match the name of the spot color in the CS app, such as Illustrator, a separations preview in Acrobat shows that both colors are defined as using the same plate in the resulting PDF. A print test of this has gone ok. [So what is the 'Ink Name' field for? Oh well...]

There is a related issue, to do with Illustrator: a new spot swatch in Illustrator (CS2) defaults to process output. You have to go into the swatch palette menu, select Swatch Options, and set it to output as spot for the shade not to result in CMYK plates. If you know that, and if you are creating your own artwork, there is no problem. If you don't, or aren't, it requires eight mouse-clicks per file to correct. I didn't, and wasn't, and there were over 420 such files in this job :-(

-- 
Steve