ScottFromWyoming

I just did about 30 test PDFs to get a handle on what's going on and here's what I see: In a file with only black ink, built in InDesign, exported with a CMYK profile embedded from InDesign, Acrobat Output Preview (with a CMYK Simulation Profile) shows ink on only the Black plate. The same file exported from Publisher shows ink on all 4 plates. If I switch Acrobat to a grayscale simulation profile, it shows as 100K and that's it. If I option-click to edit a black object from the "bad" PDF using Illustrator, it opens up correctly as 0,0,0,100K. A second file built natively in Publisher, set up as a grayscale file, also fails in the same way: Previewed in Acrobat with a CMYK simulation, it has ink on all 4 plates. Unembedding the profile fixes the problem... which isn't really a problem so long as the file outputs correctly, but it makes preflighting nearly impossible. My black-only PDF will be placed onto a page with CMYK objects and that will be exported to CMYK; my black PDF must not separate! So maybe the profile-embedding is converting the preview to RGB while leaving the actual underlying vector data alone? I'll keep testing.

Just out of curiosity, I think it would be interesting to know if you're on Windows or Mac; there are apparently some differences in how they behave. As to the colors, I am guessing but in "passthrough" mode, it's passing EVERYTHING through, including the color settings saved with the PDF. So it's not attempting to interpret them or convert them to your Publisher working space. In the end I think this is fine; if not, then open the PDF itself and convert to the profile/color settings required (assuming you have Acrobat Pro or some other tool for making that edit). If not, if you're saving the PDF with known CMYK values but the output of the PDF when placed in Publisher is different, then yeah that sounds like it's not good.

Look in the Preflight panel; lower left of the window there's a little green light icon or a red light. Click that to open the preflight panel to see all the missing fonts. I still haven't found how to embed or unembed individual objects. Not a real problem; the situation will be rare when I need to edit a PDF and I also have all the fonts. So I'll stick with using Acrobat Pro to make that sort of edit.

So I have the latest Beta 1.9 going now and it does seem to solve the problem. Interestingly, even on "interpret" it doesn't explode and give me font missing warnings etc... I can't find a way to edit it at all. I was sort of looking forward to that option (in Acrobat Pro, I often delete elements from provided PDFS, such as "YOUR BUSINESS NAME HERE"). More important, the PDF preview does change, but in neither case does it give me font errors, etc. It changes appearance somewhat but I can't tell what it's showing me... transparency? At any rate, we're past the first hurdle; PDFs seem to place without a hitch. Leaving it on Passthrough forever won't be a problem... can't miss what you've never had, right?

Ah. Yep I'm using the 1.8.6 version. My company asked me to put the app thru its paces and it stumbled out of the gate. Will check back when 1.9 comes out. Thanks!

Is there a way to *force* the "pass-through" function? Because I need to place PDFs from many different sources and not only do I not want to do any manipulation to them, I cannot: if I edit a file in any way and it then prints poorly, we don't get paid. Requiring any workarounds just won't work... the Publisher document has to simply be a container for multiple PDFs placed on one page. Dragging from the finder is no help:

*looks at calendar* I need a trial version to show the bossman what it can do. Now that Apple's pushing their new 64-bit only OS, a lot of us with CS6 or earlier are finally needing to get serious about a replacement...

Yes, from the 1800s, it's an old unit like pints and feet, altho with the advent of computers, we did update to exactly 6 picas per inch, rather than the old measure which worked out to something like 6.0005 picas to the inch.

No, I took OP's request as wanting something like View/Screen Mode/Preview in InDesign, which turns off all extraneous marks and nonprinting items, grays out the pasteboard. I can toggle it on and off by just typing W.

I'm happy to be testing this out and will put it thru its paces for a week before commenting more... But is there a FAQ page for the Beta? Is printing disabled or am I doing something wrong? PDF worked great tho.

I don't want the current printer to ever affect the document. I have printers for quick proofing, but the output is PDF 99.9% of the time. What output device I may be connected to at the moment is 100% irrelevant! Thanks.

The first thing I tried to do was set up a doc using picas. Of course I can redesign the page but 1p is so much easier to type than .167in