Black printing in Publisherr

[gtdesigner]

I just purchased Affinity Publisher, hoping to eliminate Adobe InDesign from my Applications folder. However, I cannot get Publisher to print in black on my laser printer, or on my CTP server. It always separates it into CMYK or RGB. I have specified the text in black only, and it consistently sends it to the printer or server as 4-color seps. At this rate, it is worthless for me, since I do not want separations of my text. Any ideas?

[Joachim_L]

Welcome to the Affinity forums @gtdesigner! What colour format do you use? I prefer CMYK (yes, even for greyscale). Do you print the documents directly or export as PDF and print from there? Finally could you upload a sample document?

[gtdesigner]

Thanks for the advice. I will try your suggestions. However, it is not only my printer, but my plate server is receiving separations for all the text, which is absolutely unacceptable. Even the pdfs, which print properly on the laser printer, separate on the server. If I don't find a way around this, Publisher is worthless for me; I may have to pay the ridiculous "subscription" fee for Adobe products.

BN#843b.pdf BN#843.afpub

[gtdesigner]

Yes! That worked as pdf on the server. Thanks so much! x1a seems to be the secret.

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[gtdesigner]

I am trying to understand your reply; thank you! I need more insight into this matter. I will re-read it a few times to get the effect. I am making progress! Thank you all.

[wonderings]

If your file is set with only K and you print to your CTP does it not see that there is no CMY? I am assuming you are printing to a RIP and then releasing from the RIP to the CTP or a TIFF Catcher. Is Publisher adding colour to the black makeup?

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[gtdesigner]

Actually, I am now exporting to pdf with black text. I am only having trouble with a fill screen in a global color, which still separates. Also, how do I modify my pdf settings within Publisher?

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[wonderings]

7 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

This is a crucial question. I do not know enough about prepress technology that I could tell whether the confusion described above can actually result in K100 build to be processed incorrectly and output as CMYK values (four-color grays), similarly as happens when you view the job using the incorrect target profile, or when you open the PDF in e.g. Photoshop and use incorrect profile, resulting in translation of K values according to your working CMYK profile. I'd imagine that professional prepress staff can sort this out and produce intended output even if the file is not correctly created. But based on posts on this forum this does not always happen.

If the file goes to the RIP with a CMYK makeup then it will interpret it that way and use that CMYK makeup. I never play around with colour profiles, I export a high quality PDF from Indesign, this maintains the CMYK values I see and use in Indesign, it also matches the RIP (unless I add a colour profile to the file for some reason). Seems getting 1 colour black has been giving some people issues and from what I gather it stems from printing from Affinity. I can make a 1 colour black file in Publisher, export as a PDF and view the separations in Acrobat DC and see that it remains 1 colour black, be it a tint of K or full 100% K.

We moved to a PDF workflow many years ago, no longer printing to a RIP, just make a PDF, drop it in a hot folder and away you go. I found headaches with printing and the drivers/PPD's. Every OS update brought forth a new issue to resolve. 

 

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[wonderings]

15 hours ago, Lagarto said:

Yes, these problems seldom appear when working with InDesign and QuarkXPress. You'd need to deliberately choose settings that are not the default. If you do, and use settings that are used in Affinity apps as default values, you'd get warnings in the UI, and would produce identical problems in exported PDFs. This does not happen because most printshops give step-by-step instructions for producing expected print PDF's from InDesign and QuarkXPress (even CorelDRAW), starting from choosing the correct document color profile. Many provide their own PDF presets to make the correct settings for users.

So, when I open the PDF provided by OP showing the problem of K values converting to four-color grays in Photoshop, I get the following dialog box if I'd have chosen to use the default color profile policy:

...and if I accept the default, I'd get the original color values (and if not, converted values, including four-color blacks). This kind of intervention and user confirmation does not happen when using viewers like Adobe Acrobat Pro, so for ICC-based PDFs not including the target color intent the user needs to manually match the viewing profile with the embedded profile to get the correct color values displayed in the Output view. If the target color intent is included in the file, Adobe Acrobat will automatically pick the correct profile, but if not, the document profile needs to be checked by examing the internals of the export file. What I do not know is whether something similar (manual operation) needs to be done in final print production to get the intended color values. I suppose that it depends, since as mentioned, there are plenty of posts where these kinds of print files have been rejected (either automatically or as a result of someone running a manual preflight check), or where the job has been printed with translated CMYK values and undesired four-color blacks.

When I inspect the PDF from the OP in Acrobat DC the text is all 100% K save for where it sits on that coloured box. I am confused by what the OP is trying to do. This is not a 2 colour job as the colour is CMYK makeup. I can see the issue if platting and all the black is coming out CMYK, makes it more difficult on press to align all the text perfectly. If I were to take the PDF supplied and send to make plates I would get all the black text on the K plate while the rest would be CMY which would be fine for printing. I would want the black text on the colour box to knock out and that would be my only concern with the file. 

I do not see any reason to bring this into Photoshop, certainly would not be part of a normal print shop workflow.  You can see in the screen shot I turned off K in separations and all the black is gone as it should be. So I would say for CMYK printing on press the PDF looks fine. Personally if you have to print to a RIP I would do it with Acrobat over Publisher as there are some issues with Publisher and printing for things of this nature. You can do more with printing separations in Acrobat DC, including sending separations to the RIP if you want to be sure it is separating how you see it on your screen. Screen shot showing this with K turned off again to show it looks fine (save for the one area mentioned). 

 

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[wonderings]

3 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

Perhaps it is easier this way -- if you open the attached PDF that has "K100" defined in K100, what do you see in Adobe Acrobat Pro Output preview, and if the sender of this file mentioned that this needs to be output in K100, would you send it back for correction or be able to produce what the user ordered, without making any manual adjustments?

isthisk100.pdf 1.31 MB · 0 downloads

The file you sent views as 100% K in Indesign but in Acrobat DC it shows a CMYK. My quick fix for this would be to just export from Indesign again, which I did and I now have a 100% K file in Indesign and Acrobat. I did the same in publisher, just opened up a standard document, did not change anything other then having the colour format for CMYK. Made my text 100 K, exported using PDF (for print) setting, no changes made. I get a PDF with 100K when viewed in Acrobat and Indesign and will in turn print 100K on our RIP, or would print to the RIP 100K. The OP file did the same and looked fine for me as I stated in a previous post. If changing profiles I think it is unnecessary and only causes problem, at least for getting a PDF that is set fine. Printing from Publisher is another matter and think there are issues there and would not be something I would suggest. 

K Test, default settings.pdf

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