Exporting global colors to PDF with Publisher

[Dirk_Germany]

Please help:
I am trying to print a book cover with golden embossing ("praegung") and varnish ("Lack"). So I created 2 global spot colors with 100% magenta each. I then assigned each color to an individual object. 
However, when I export the document as PDF/X, only one of the two spot colors is in the PDF, never both. 
What do I do wrong?

[thomaso]

Did you name both spot colour swatches differently? Note, a spot colour swatch may have 2 different names, one as 'Global Swatch' (in the Swatches Panel) and one for the spot attribute (export / print) which is displayed in the Colours Panel below the 'global name'.

To me in V1 it appears if two swatches have the same spot colour name only one gets assigned and exported, even if the global swatch names are different. Below "spot M" is used twice as spot colour name: 1x for global swatch name "spot M" and 1x for "Global Colour 84". The latter does not get exported and whenever I reselect this object it has the other "spot M" swatch assigned.

[Dirk_Germany]

Hi,

thank you so much for your detailed answer!

 

It did indeed read as if it could be the cause of this. The interface is a bit different in the v2 I am using. I still found the names for spot and swatch color. However, swatch and spot color name were already the same inside of each color and different between the two colors.

I verified it again and I tried exporting to all different formats. However, it just won't work.

I will now see if I can find a workaround by sending a TIFF to the printer. But of course then I will lose all vectors, curves and fonts and they have to print it as a bitmap 😞

[thomaso]

If there is no problem in V2, I can only assume that something went wrong when naming the spot colours. You can try the attached .afpub + PDF. Even the PDF opens in Affinity with 3x 100% magenta as 3 different spot colours and names (but without swatches of course).

What is your trick/workaround with TIFF? I just can't imagine in what way another file format may solve your issue with spot colours.

 v1 _ 3x magenta spot.afpub   v1 _ 3x magenta spot.pdf

[Dirk_Germany]

This allowed me to track down the source of the problem. Thank you so much!

I have created a rectangle with the spot color and used a mask to only cover the spots where I want the partial varnish applied. When I disable the map, the spot color is correctly exported to the PDF. When I enable the mask, the spot color is missing from the PDF.

I have a hunch that this may be related to using a soft brush. Maybe a spot color requires a mask that can only use pure black and pure white. I will try that next.

 

v1 _ 3x magenta spot_mask.afpub

[Dirk_Germany]

I finally managed to solve my problem. Instead of using a mask inside the swatch colored object, I converted it into a curve and created the shape with the curve. Now the color export works as expected.

[thomaso]

v1 _ spot rasterized.afpubI can't open V2 documents so I guess only. Did you get issues with spot colour + rasterization? Attached samples of spot colour objects for rasterized (= pixel) export. Note, the second black object excepted, all objects export with spot colour, although all of them export rasterized, whereas the magenta + first black objects are vector in the .afpub.

v1 _ spot rasterized.afpub   v1 _ spot rasterized.pdf