Distiller or Save as postscript settings?

johnt · Post by **johnt** » Fri Sep 06, 2013 1:43 pm

Greetings,

I have created a flow that uses metadata and pitstop to convert certain pages of a pdf to gray and leaving the other ones four-color. Then, in the flow, the pdf is opened in acrobat, exported as postscript and finally distilled back to a pdf again. This is done as part of our preflight process to get customer pdf's compliant with our rips and avoid flattening issues and issues with form objects that both our fiery and harlequin rips have problems with.

The problem I am having is that some files will end up having the pages that were converted to gray turn back to cmyk indexed color. Furthermore, if I distill first, then convert to gray the gray pages stay gray, but become indexed. I have tried different distiller settings but nothing seems to help.

Freddy Pieters and enfocus suggested a ghostscript flow…

"You can convert PDF to Postscript and the other way around with Ghostscript (http://www.ghostscript.com). It has a CLI so you can use that with the "Execute command" element."

Does anyone have a flow with ghostscript? I am completely unfamiliar with this program. I have always distilled files using acrobat.

Another question I have is how to control the "Save as postscript" settings when Switch opens Acrobat and then saves the file our as postscript to be distilled. There are settings to test such as using language level 3, etc. but it seems I have no control over that. Unless acrobat uses the "last used" settings which I have no way of knowing.

I just want to be able to convert my pdf's to gray, distill and have distiller leave the color "as is"

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

johnt · Post by **johnt** » Mon Sep 09, 2013 2:53 pm

I am just following up to my original post and just wondering if others use switch to include distilling files to preflight before ripping. Or if pitstop server is used to flatten files, or maybe the best success is with pdf toolbox?

mattbeals · Post by **mattbeals** » Wed Sep 11, 2013 12:44 am

You would have to set the export settings in the save as postscript widow in Acrobat. It will remember the last settings used.

I find it easier to use callas pdfToolbox to do these things since it is multithreaded. Acrobat Pro can only work on one file at a time. pdfToolbox also has a function to "re-distill" which will internally convert to postscript and then re-distill it in one process. You can pick the job options that you want, like "high quality" or a custom .joboptions file.

Indexed color should not at all be a problem. It's really just a form of compression. Grayscale one could argue is inherently compressed since it has 256 shades or less.

Indexed color is good. The problem would be is what base colorspace the indexing is in (RGB or CMYK).

dkelly · Post by **dkelly** » Wed Sep 11, 2013 9:10 pm

Edit your distiller parameter settings and set ConvertImagesToIndexed to false

/ConvertImagesToIndexed false

johnt · Post by **johnt** » Thu Sep 12, 2013 1:28 pm

Thanks for the posts. This has been very helpful. The only thing I don't know where to change is the distiller parameter settings as suggested for index color to false. I have "leave color unchanged" checked under the color tab in distiller right now but I don't see anything for index.

dkelly · Post by **dkelly** » Thu Sep 12, 2013 3:57 pm

Open your settings and select "Save As". Edit the joboptions file using a text editor and then reopen it Distiller.