Acrobat 7 screens black text, Should print 100% Black

[Deborah_Bishop@adobeforums.com]

We're a service bureau, outputting customer's supplied PDF files to negative film, on a Mac G4, OS10.2.8, using Acrobat 7. Sometimes when we output directly from Acrobat 7, all type prints out a screened percentage of black, not 100% black as it should. (If you print to a laser printer, it's too difficult to see this effect, but it's quite apparent on negative film). However, if we import the PDF file into InDesign and print through that, type prints out correctly as 100% black.

In the research I've done, it seems to happen on PDF files version 1.4 (Acrobat 5).
Since the files I receive come from a wide variety of customers, it's not possible to instruct everyone to save their PDF files in a certain version.

Is there any fix to this bug in Acrobat? I'd like to print directly from Acrobat, and have the type print out 100% black, not a "rich black" combination of CMYK. Note: we are NOT printing the file as an image, so that is not the problem!

[SuperMacGuy@adobeforums.com]

I found that when exporting a PDF from InDesign I would get the same problem, black text at 92% not 100%. I then found that turning off color management (oh color mgt how you confuse me!) would allow the PDF to have 100% black text.
You can turn off color mgt in Acrobat, but does that fix the problem for you then?

[Deborah_Bishop@adobeforums.com]

I turned off color management in Acrobat 7, and yes, that did solve the problem with the type being screened...thanks! However, I neglected to mention the second problem I was having, which I mistakenly thought was related to the first.

Problem 2: it appears any scanned graphics that should be in 100% black are being screened at about 90% -- and worse, they also have a very light screened box around them. I'm not sure if the customer scanned them as RGB, CMYK or grayscale.

Again, this problem does not occur if I import the PDF file into InDesign, and print from there...

Any ideas??? Thanks for any and all help!

[Jon_Bessant@adobeforums.com]

If you do not have a professional workflow to print the PDFs - I would
recommend using CRACKERJACK from ARTS - [url]http://www.artspdf.com[/url]

This is a plug-in for Adobe Acrobat

This is a great way to save configurations and control many output
options - and hot-folder based also for automation ...

Jon

[Deborah_Bishop@adobeforums.com]

It appears that this is a bug in Acrobat -- hopefully, Adobe will fix. I checked into the plug-in "Crackerjack" -- it looks like a great solution, however, it costs $500, which is a little steep for a very small company such as mine.

Thanks for everyone's help (I had received no answers when I called Adobe....)

[MarkATS@adobeforums.com]

It appears that this is a bug in Acrobat -- hopefully, Adobe will fix.




can't fix if they don't know about it. Make sure you file a bug report.