Removing extraneous color channel information

[Steve Rickaby]

David, thanks for thinking about this.

At 08:39 -0800 15/12/11, David Creamer wrote:

>OmniGraffle is the problem (as far as your issue is concerned). Like most
>business-related programs, it works in RGB. Its drop shadows are RGB and pixel-based, so Illustrator can convert the RGB to CMYK, but it can't change a the resulting CMYK shadow to grayscale/K-only shadow.

A, I see. Oh. Pity I didn't know that back at the beginning. OmniG was the author's choice: he did his own diagrams.

>The easiest thing to do is upgrade to a newer version of Acrobat. You can
>convert the entire document to grayscale, removing the CMY seps.
>(I don't remember if version 6 can do that or not--it has been too long
>since I used that version.)

I looked for this sort of option, but could not find it.

Trouble is, I'm locked to 10.4.11 by FrameMaker, at present at least, so upgrades are becoming problematic.

I can't just remove the CMY, I need to map them onto the K. Would a more recent version of Acrobat do this? If so, I can maybe find someone who has one and can do the one-shot conversion of the pre-press file with it?

>PDF/X-3 will not solve your problem as it does not convert color.

No, I wasn't looking for it as a solution to that, but merely as a recognisable standard for the printers. I'm still trying to find out if they can do the CMY -> K shift.

>As an aside, I would either make a commitment to FrameMaker or to the Mac.
>If FrameMaker--get a Windows computer, run Boot Camp on the Mac, or get
>Parallels (or similar program) to run Windows on your Mac.
>For the latter two, you may need a newer Mac, especially for the last
>option. Then upgrade FrameMaker and Acrobat.

You give good advice, but not something I can do when faced with a deadline. That's my long-term plan, for sure. My commitment to FrameMaker is absolute and goes back to v 3, 1992.

>If you want to say strictly Mac, consider using InDesign (and still upgrade
>Acrobat).

I do use InDesign as well, but not for textbooks. InDesign's ink manager allows you to do this sort of thing inside the app.

Thanks for clarifying the issues.
-- 
Steve