PDF and Spot Colour

[masque]

Derek,

So your black text contains all 4 (CMYK) colors?

Yes, thats right.

[coza]

Somehow this does not make sense, if you generate a PDF with your text having a value of 100K which is the true black for what you hope to achieve, and your printer is telling you it contains any other values, then somewhere something has gone wrong, the 100K is your black spot colour, there should be no combination of other values to give you black, if you add any other spot colour, you will have 5 plates to print. I would go as far and ask him what the CMYK values are of the black he says is not black in his opinion, to possibly filter out the confusion here. Possibly the conversion of the text to curves could also be giving a problem, some postscript handlers cannot smooth certain amounts of curves correctly, you could try and "loan" him the font/s to get past this possiblity.

Hope this helps - George

[masque]

That’s what I thought and the text in question is 100%K. I must admit I have produced a fairly large amount of work of this type using PDF and text has not been a problem previously, it’s just that doubt was caused by the assertion that all of a sudden I should have somehow exported a spot colour to ensure sharpness to the text. I must admit that I’m fairly confident the fault is not with me and/or Xtreme I was just after the opinion of others to hopefully support this view, if indded that is the case.

[alexbozhenov]

Derek,

I wrote about somewhere in this forum... I guess you copy/paste your text stuff from program like Word etc. And also, sometimes you have to select your text block with Selector tool (not just with Text tool) when assigning 100% Black... There are not miracles - if you have 4-color Black in the PDF, you have the same mixed values in your original Xar file. Also, the latest update for Xtreme 4 should contains updated PDF filter for exporting which are making overprint for the 100% Black correctly (the Adobe Illustrator style). Your printer guy is right (for my opinion), when complaining about 4-color CMYK for the text -- keep 100% Black for the black text and set it to overprint, and for other text colors (non-black, but dark) -- keep it no more than 3 colors... It's a common mistake...

[gwpriester]

Pantone colors are treated as spot colors.

But if there are any process colors, then the file will show CMYK as well as the spot colors.

The trick is not to use Pantone Process colors. Use Pantone Black instead of Process Black.

In Acrobat the color manager still shows CMYK but it also shows the spot colors and properly identifies them by number.

[Albacore]

This might be the problem? http://talkgraphics.com/showthread.p...ight=overprint

If you want you can upload Xara file and we can see if there is any problems and check it for you in AI or Acro.