Enfocus Community

Good morning to all.

New user here, mostly interested in the Preflight function. Apologies for a long note, but I'm trying to be exact in my question.

BACKGROUND:
One of my customers (a corporate printer) gets Word files from customers, and forwards them to me for reformatting into different page sizes. Most of these Word documents are prepared by secretaries or legal departments, and they have no knowledge (or interest) in the printing process. Some of these documents go back and forth and back and forth between departments (and many computers) before the language is finalized, and I only see them after the legal language is approved.

My job is NEVER to edit or change language, but only to standardize the formatting for consistency. (I might consider myself an expert in using Styles, and I use them all the time.)

THE PROBLEM:
While almost all text comes in with a color of "Automatic," there are occasional headings or chunks of edited text that appear to be black, but when you highlight individual words the text the color might appear to be "undefined." ALL styles have a text color of "Automatic," but some text does not change color (although it all appears to print as black).

I finish my formatting, make a PDF file, and send it to my customer's production department. On maybe 2% of all these jobs (there are many jobs), I get a message that bits of text are not coming in as black. With that, I am interested in using Pitstop to check for text that is NOT 100% black (using CMYK).

I fully understand using predefined Preflight Profiles, and making up my own profiles for my specific searches.

My problem seems to be finding or creating a profile that would search for specific CMYK values. I would like to search for text that does NOT have the CMYK values of 0, 0, 0, 100.

QUESTIONS:
(a) if there is a predefined profile, where would I find it?
(b) if I needed to create my own search profile, is there a specific starting point which I could then amend (and rename) for my purposes)?

Again, apologies for the long text, but I'm trying to avoid the back-and-forth on this message board.

Thanks very much!

-- Van Morrow
typenyc@gmail.com

Hi there,

"(a) if there is a predefined profile, where would I find it?"

Yes, there is one default Preflight Profile meant for PDFs coming from Office.
See


"(b) if I needed to create my own search profile, is there a specific starting point which I could then amend (and rename) for my purposes)?"

Yes, create a new one from selected:

And tweak it the way you want.

Hope that helps.
Loic

Loic:

THANK YOU for the response.

I fee like I'm getting closer.
The "Just Make My Office PDF Work!" choices seem (to me) to work within the RGB space.

A more precise inquiry would be:
-- Can I search specifically for text where the values are not "C = 0, M = 0, Y = 0, K = 100"?

---------

I did try a preflight choice included in Acrobat that was geared to looking at CMYK, and when I clicked on the "K" the text that was not 100% black dropped out -- that told me exactly where to go back in the Word document and fix specific lines.

Is there a choice in Pitstop that looks specifically at CMYK values?

Again, thanks VERY MUCH for your attention.

Be well.

-- Van
917-558-0894

There are two ways of answering your question:

Generally, you could use the Action "If it looks Black and convert to Black" (possibly restricting to text objects only), or the Global Change "Clean up Black" (can be saved as Action List).

Or you could do the following:

- select text segements
- select fill color > C0 M0 Y0 K100
AND
NOT
- select text segements
AND

But that would be poor approach I believe because I think you really want to ensure that all text are K100, so the initial "if it lloks black and convert to black" should be yoru preferred option.

Note that the "Make my Office PDF works" already contains the "Clean up Black". So your problem is maybe that you have tones of grey, and you only want 100% K. Again, you can simply select text that looks black and make them black, or simply change their fill property?