Publisher - greyscale PDF creates 4 plate PDF

[lacerto]

(...)

[Gaunilo]

I just had the same problem: Document in grey, text only (apart from a logo) and exported as greyscale PDFX4… according to the printer I got a PDF in 4c.
This should be really easier and most of all: consistent. At the moment I have the feeling that the choices when exporting PDF don't have any effect at all.

 

[lacerto]

(...)

[claidheamdanns]

I would like to chime in and say that this is infuriatingly complicated. Just for giggles, I created a new blank document, set as

• Color Format: Gray/16
• Color Profile: Generic Gray Gamma 2.2 Profile

I added one word in black only, and exported it using the Preset:

• PDF (press ready)

Results opened in Acrobat Pro:

• CMYK black text

Good thing I have Pitstop Pro to convert the text back to black only again. But it's ridiculous that this doesn't work correctly. I'm trying to teach a customer how to export their files correctly when they send them to us to be printed, because they are using Affinity, so I downloaded the apps to my computer. But I'm an hour in and haven't found any way to get their files to export as grayscale. Nor could I get the simple file that I created to export as Grayscale.

I've read through this entire thread and tried all the options suggested here, and none of them have resolved this.

[ashf]

That is "by design."
Photoshop treats grayscale as RGB. it's the same in Affinity.
Black & white document for printing have to be created in CMYK mode.
 

 

[Dave Dennis]

I beg to differ...

When I create a greyscale image in photoshop it is exported as greyscale tif/jpg etc. It is not converted to rgb.

Single colour printing is as old as the printing press and it is bizarre that Publisher can't output a single colour file consistently.

[lacerto]

See if this post could help you:

In a nutshell: If you have Gray color mode, you need to use the Grayscale color definitions (which are basically RGB but handled as grayscale when exported to Grayscale). K definitions would produce dark gray. If you have a CMYK document color mode, you need to use K definitions (to avoid four-color black), using grayscale definitions is the same as using RGB composites.

[Medical Officer Bones]

Same with placed 1bit tiff files. Those are silently converted to 8bit RGB files, which is a critical issue. And it does not matter working in CMYK document colour mode or whichever PDF output settings.

Let's hope R2 fixes this! Looking forward to tomorrow's presentation. I expect this to be solved in the next version.

[claidheamdanns]

At work now and looking at this again. I didn't save all the different settings that I tried, but this is one of them: 

[adrianlambert]

Any word on whether V2 is handling PDF Export correctly?