[Acrobat-Preflight fails for ICC profile check]

Hi everyone

As we’re still experiencing the failure of the preflight check in Adobe Acrobat even with the latest Publisher beta:

Has anyone been able to export a PDF-X1a with a profile such as ISO Coated v2 that passes the preflight profile PDFX-ready Sheetfed Offset Classic HQ V1.5.? We continue to get the error

Quote

Output Intent not suitable for printing (unknown ICC profile) (V2.4)

Thanks for any input!

[Acrobat-Preflight fails for ICC profile check]

Hi thomaso and everyone who replied!

Thank you for your replies!

Returning to your first message, @thomaso:

21 hours ago, thomaso said:

I don't get an error message when exporting to X-1a with ISO Coated v2 300% (ECI) .
Also the result looks fine for preflight, see screenhot:

Just to be sure: Which preflight profile did you use that did not return an error?

We get the error ("Output Intent not suitable for printing (unknown ICC profile) (V2.4)") with the preflight profile PDFX-ready Sheetfed Offset Classic HQ V1.5.

As I said: The PDF looks fine for printing. So this is mostly a question of complying to our workflow. But we would like to get to the bottom of the question, whether the fault lies with the preflight profile or in the way Affinity Publisher writes ICC profiles into the PDF.

[Acrobat-Preflight fails for ICC profile check]

Dear Affinity Users and Developers

We’re just in the process of evaluating Affinity Publisher (tested with 1.7.0.305 and 1.7.0.312) and we’ve come upon a problem with the PDF/X export:

In our workflow our print PDF files are checked in Adobe Acrobat against the preflight profile PDFX-ready Sheetfed Offset Classic HQ V1.5. Among other things this profile checks the MD5 checksums of the used ICC profile against a pre-defined list of profiles known to be appropriate for offset printing.

When exporting a PDF as PDF/X-1a with the ICC profile ISO Coated v2 300% (ECI) from Affinity Publisher the preflight returns this error:

Quote

Output Intent not suitable for printing (unknown ICC profile) (V2.4)

Looking at the preflight report in the section Output Intents I noticed a difference between a PDF exported from InDesign and Affinity Publisher:

• The Output Intent is stated as ISO Coated v2 300% (ECI) for the InDesign-PDF and as ISO Coated v2 300% (ECI) (Custom) for Affinity Publisher
• The Color Management Module had a value of HDM (InDesign) and lcms (Affinity Publisher).
• Primäre Zielplattform (in English probably: Primary Target Platform): empty (InDesign) and Apple Computer, Inc. (APPL) (Affinity Publisher)
• Profil erstellt mit (in English probably: Profile created with): Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (HDM ) (InDesign) and lcms (Affinity Publisher)
• The other fields were the same in both files.

So I suspected this to be the reason for the different MD5 checksums. But not being an expert on the ins and outs of PDFs and colour management I turned to HilfDirSelbst.ch where we discussed this (in German) in this thread. Olaf Drümmer of callas concluded (my translation):

Quote

I assume when exporting to PDF Affinity [Publisher] loads the profile from RAM rather than from disk and writes it to the PDF.

So the profile was probably loaded from disk (with the help of Little CMS) when opening a document requiring that profile. Then it’s being used while working on the document and on exporting to PDF it’s written from RAM to the PDF file. Because that probably also happens using Little CMS, the field Creator of the profile in the PDF is filled with "lcms".

That’s not a bad approach – but unfortunately the checksums can’t match. Little CMS is neither better nor worse than other CMMs (either Adobe or Heidelberg)

[…]

So the question is

• Is Affinity Publisher correct in changing the meta-data of the profile when writing the PDF file?
• And if so: Would PDFX-ready need to append their list of MD5 checksums to include those of profiles created with lcms?

Any insights and suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Best

phph