Publisher - Natively exported PDFs (from Designer) not maintaining CMYK values when imported

[deeland]

I've seen all sorts of posts on odd colour behaviours with PDFs … this is a fairly simple example:

1. a CMYK value of K50 (mid-grey) created in Designer - a simple graphic of flat colour
2. export as PDF/X-4 (Default settings)
3. Placed in Publisher … and the K50 grey becomes a Rich Grey C45 M36 Y37 K16

Obviously not ideal.

Colour Management is consistent between the suite of Affinity apps. sRGB / FOGRA 39 / Greyscale D50 / Relative Colourimetric

Is this a known issue? Happy to provide sample files, if needed.

If I place the artboard from Designer into Publisher, it's perfect.

Edit: I should also add - when testing with an EPS, the K50 is maintained. Kind of odd, when I've always considered a PDF to be the best modern alternative to EPS. In this instance, EPS remains King.

My ideal workflow would be similar to my old Adobe habits; placing native Designer files (with Adobe it was Illustrator files, of course, via "Save each artboard to a separate file"). I'm working with around 200 artboards, so it's doable, but time-consuming. So I'm going through options to create a workflow that enables me to use Data Merge to populate pages of a presentation efficiently, and the best option is PDF.

A wish would be for the ability to Data Merge artboards from a Designer master file, in lieu of not being able to export individual artboards from Designer, as Designer files. Is this possibly something for a Wish List somewhere in the forum?

Edited March 15 by deeland
adding info re: EPS

[Hangman]

Hi @deeland,

10 minutes ago, deeland said:

I've seen all sorts of posts on odd colour behaviours with PDFs … this is a fairly simple example:

1. a CMYK value of K50 (mid-grey) created in Designer - a simple graphic of flat colour
2. export as PDF/X-4 (Default settings)
3. Placed in Publisher … and the K50 grey becomes a Rich Grey C45 M36 Y37 K16

This should certainly work correctly, but it sounds as though there is a colour conversion happening between Designer and Publisher...

If you can upload a sample source Designer file along with the exported PDF/X-4 file and the Publisher file you've placed the PDF into, we can figure out where this is going wrong...

13 minutes ago, deeland said:

My ideal workflow would be similar to my old Adobe habits; placing native Designer files (with Adobe it was Illustrator files, of course, via "Save each artboard to a separate file"). I'm working with around 200 artboards, so it's doable, but time-consuming. So I'm going through options to create a workflow that enables me to use Data Merge to populate pages of a presentation efficiently, and the best option is PDF.

Are your 200 Artboards all contained within the same document or are they individual files? If they all appear in one file, could you not just place the Designer file in Publisher and select the relevant Artboard for each page from the Context toolbar or is it a bit more involved than that?

16 minutes ago, deeland said:

So I'm going through options to create a workflow that enables me to use Data Merge to populate pages of a presentation efficiently, and the best option is PDF.

Is your plan to Data Merge the exported PDF files? If so, I'm not sure that is going to be the best approach, but if you could provide a little more background regarding what it is you are looking to achieve with a few screenshots that would be extremely helpful and allow others to provide options or suggestions as to the best approach to adopt...

[deeland]

12 minutes ago, Hangman said:

If you can upload a sample source Designer file along with the exported PDF/X-4 file and the Publisher file you've placed the PDF into, we can figure out where this is going wrong...

Firstly, thanks for the reply. See attached (package.zip) - this is generated in its simplest form, and recreates the same issue as described. Hopefully, it's just a simple oversight on my part.

14 minutes ago, Hangman said:

Are your 200 Artboards all contained within the same document or are they individual files?

Yes … all in the same single master file, as artboards.

 

15 minutes ago, Hangman said:

If they all appear in one file, could you not just place the Designer file in Publisher and select the relevant Artboard for each page from the Context toolbar or is it a bit more involved than that?

That's how I was working, but it's repetitive. Using the artboard selection does give the best results, in my opinion. I prefer to keep files native throughout a workflow. As I said, though … using a Data Merge technique is something I've used historically with (ye who shan't be named (Adobe Creative Suite)) to process lots of repetitive layout elements. That used to be InDesign nested within InDesign, which had been populated via scripts and CSV (the company at the time never did invest in a database.)

 

20 minutes ago, Hangman said:

Is your plan to Data Merge the exported PDF files?

It works just fine. Screenshots are tricky, given the unfinished status, and being client work. However, it's a simple grid of graphics with accompanying text labels beneath each. Nothing fancy.

CMYK Grey Oddity K50 - package.zip

[Hangman]

Hi @deeland,

Many thanks for the files, they were really helpful...

1 hour ago, deeland said:

See attached (package.zip) - this is generated in its simplest form, and recreates the same issue as described. Hopefully, it's just a simple oversight on my part.

The CMYK values you see in your Publisher document are a direct result of sampling the Placed PDF file with the Colour Picker tool...

Placed PDF files are displayed in Passthrough mode, a raster version of the placed file. This allows the integrity of the source PDF file to be maintained similarly to a PDF Reader, i.e., if you opened a PDF file in Publisher but didn't have the relevant fonts installed, it wouldn't display correctly.

Subsequently, if you use the colour picker to check the colour values of the placed PDF, I believe it is showing an RGB/CMYK conversion so the grey won't show as K50.

Also worth noting is that when exporting to EPS, Designer doesn't provide an option to embed a colour profile, so if you have Convert opened files to working space enabled in Publisher's Colour Settings, any unprofiled EPS file will be converted to the working profile of the Publisher document it is placed in changing its CMYK values...

Since your default working CMYK colour profile is already set to FOGRA39 in both Designer and Publisher, try the following:

1. Create a new CMYK/8, FOGRA39 Publisher document with Image Placement set to Linked - The default CMYK values will show K10
2. Place the Designer, EPS and PDF files into your new document
3. Select the Placed PDF file on Canvas or via the Layers panel and change PDF Passthrough from Passthrough to Interpret in the Context toolbar
4. Use the Colour Picker tool in the Colour panel to sample the colour values for all three files and they should all show as K50

2 hours ago, deeland said:

That's how I was working, but it's repetitive. Using the artboard selection does give the best results, in my opinion. I prefer to keep files native throughout a workflow. As I said, though … using a Data Merge technique is something I've used historically with (ye who shan't be named (Adobe Creative Suite)) to process lots of repetitive layout elements. That used to be InDesign nested within InDesign, which had been populated via scripts and CSV (the company at the time never did invest in a database.)

I think a lot depends on the complexity of the Placed PDF files, so you would need to run some Data Merge tests to determine whether or not this is the case. If this is working without issue using the PDF file URLs in your Data Merge, then it's no less onerous than exporting all 200 Artboards individually and specifying their URLs.

As an alternative approach, you could open a copy of your Designer Artboard document in Publisher, click Convert Artboards to Spreads and then export to PDF with Area set to All Pages in the PDF Export Settings. Use a Command Line tool like qpdf to split the 200 page exported PDF file into 200 individual, sequentially named PDF files, maintaining the PDF file integrity, which would be very quick and provide an equally quick way to create the PDF URLs in Excel or Apple Numbers using concatenation...

[deeland]

7 hours ago, Hangman said:

Select the Placed PDF file on Canvas or via the Layers panel and change PDF Passthrough from Passthrough to Interpret in the Context toolbar

Great! That worked on a duplicate of the existing Publisher file, so no need to recreate. Thanks for clarifying the PDF placement option (which I'd completely forgotten about). Not only does the Grey = K50, but the graphic is nice and sharp (not rasterised, by the looks of it.)

7 hours ago, Hangman said:

As an alternative approach, you could open a copy of your Designer Artboard document in Publisher, click Convert Artboards to Spreads and then export to PDF with Area set to All Pages in the PDF Export Settings.

I'm not aware of that ability (Convert Artboards to Spreads) … where does that command in Publisher live? From what I'm seeing, it seems a bit destructive, but handy for some things? With my current workflow, I'm simply outputting the artboards directly from Designer through Export Persona, as PDF.

Thanks for the help … happy to find out more on the "Convert Artboards to Spreads" … if you have a moment.

[Hangman]

5 hours ago, deeland said:

Great! That worked on a duplicate of the existing Publisher file, so no need to recreate. Thanks for clarifying the PDF placement option (which I'd completely forgotten about). Not only does the Grey = K50, but the graphic is nice and sharp (not rasterised, by the looks of it.)

Interpret will display the graphics in their original form so vector graphics will appear nice and crisp rather than rasterised as they do when displayed using Passthrough...

5 hours ago, deeland said:

I'm not aware of that ability (Convert Artboards to Spreads) … where does that command in Publisher live? From what I'm seeing, it seems a bit destructive, but handy for some things? With my current workflow, I'm simply outputting the artboards directly from Designer through Export Persona, as PDF.

Thinking about it further, 'Convert artboards to spreads' isn't the most practical option as it is destructive, (you would do that by opening your Designer document in Publisher and selecting the option in the Pages panel). 

Your current approach makes far more sense, exporting your 200 Artboards to PDF as Slices in Designer's Export Perona and then adding the respective URLs to your Excel or CSV file for the Data Merge is the only practical option and would be very quick.

In terms of making a feature request to be able to Data Merge artboards from a Designer master file, the best place to do that is in the Feedback for the Affinity V2 Suite of Products Forum.