Why Do All My PDFs from Microsoft Office Print Fuzzy?

PDFs can "print fuzzy" when the black text is actually composed of all four colors of ink: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. This is a common problem from PDFs created from Microsoft Office documents. Before I send PDFs such as this to a commercial printer, I like to fix the blacks so that the document will print properly.

Let's take a look at a PDF with these incorrect blacks. In Acrobat, go to the Print Production pane > Output Preview.

I moused over the large black portion and the ink values are shown below. Notice how the black is actually composed of all four colors of ink.

When I turn off the black plate, the other three colors remain.

So how do we fix this? A quick search on google and even acrobatusers.com yields no quick results. I'm not a professional prepress technician, and I only need to convert the blacks in an PDF every once in awhile, so I tend to forget how, because I do it so infrequently. When I need to convert RGB blacks, I need to be able to do it without spending an hour or more searching on forums trying to figure it out. So for my own benefit, as well as any others who need to convert RGB PDFs from Office, here's the quick, super simplified explanation of how to do this.

1. Go to Print Production pane > Convert Colors.

That will bring up this dialog box. For our purposes, there are only two things to be concerned with in this dialog box. The first is the Conversion Profile. You can choose from a variety of CMYK conversion profiles, but SWOP is a good bet. And fortunately, it is the default here in the United States. Be sure to use a profile appropriate for your country.

The second thing to be concerned with (and this is the most important part), is the "Preserve Black" checkbox. According to the Adobe website, "Preserve Black preserves any black objects drawn in CMYK, RGB, or grayscale during conversion. This option prevents text in RGB black from being converted to rich black when converted to CMYK."

Click ok, and you are done. Now when you open the Output Preview dialog box and mouse over the back area, notice how the blacks are corrected.

And when you turn off the black plate, all the blacks disappear, as they should. Now the document will print properly.

I hope this tutorial will help you more quickly convert the RGB blacks in your Microsoft Office PDFs.

Adventures in Flexible File Prep: New Twist on PDF Form Fields

Background

I am the graphic designer for my church. As a designer, I want my designs to look as good as possible, keeping in mind the final output device as well as the skills and tools of the people who need to use my files. I've written a couple of other articles about my adventures in designing these situations.

• Designing for Small Non-Profits: Preparing Flexible Files to Be Used with Consumer-Grade Software
• Bulletproof, flexible files for Adobe Reader Users

The Why

I've started using using a new trick recently. We needed to create some lanyards for use in our children's ministry.

In coming up with this workflow, there were a few must-haves on my list of requirements.

• The final PDF must be multi-up on a page and able to be printed on a standard letter-sized paper
• The person printing the PDF needs to be able to easily add text to the PDF (without having to watch a tutorial video or read an article in order to figure out how to do so).
• The editable part of the document needs to use a fun font. Nothing boring like Helvetica.

The folks in the office need to be able to edit the name, using ONLY Adobe Reader

The How

So I started with a simple 1-up design in InDesign, located on an 8.5 x 11 page. Somewhere in the design, you'll need some type that uses the font you'll want to use in your form fields. In my case, the live type is in the word "Staff." The reason for this is because we want that fun font embedded into the PDF.

Because this piece is only 1-sided, you don't have to be very precise in where you put the 1-up design. I made my 1-up with crop marks. There is a built-in crop marks script in InDesign. I wrote an article about it awhile back. (Scroll down to step 6, and skip everything else.)

Next, we're going to add a form field. Go to Window > Interactive > Buttons and Forms to bring up the Buttons and Forms panel. Then draw a rectangle roughly the size that you want for the space where the office staff will type the name in Adobe Reader.

With the rectangle selected, click Convert to Button.

Next, in the drop down list in the panel, change the type from Button to Text Field.

Make sure to check the box that indicates that your form field will be printable (it is checked by default). And make sure the size is set to Auto.

Now, group all your objects and out them multiple on a page. In my case, six of them fit on the page. Be sure and hold shift when option+dragging them, so that they stay aligned.

Now, export an Interactive PDF. This is important because as of the date of this article, print PDFs cannot contain form field objects. In the Forms and Media section of the dialog box, click Include All.

Now, I need to give a disclaimer here because normally, I would never use an InDesign Interactive PDF for a professional print job. "Why," you ask? Because interactive PDFs export as RGB. That means that plain blacks are converted to RGB rich blacks. Normally, that would be a very, very big deal for me. But this is going to be printed 1 sheet at a time, on an multi-function office printer, and there is no small type. So RGB blacks don't matter to me here.

Next, open the PDF in Acrobat. See how all the form fields are highlighted in purple? (Notice also how my nice blue background changed to greenish. I'm not sure why. I suspect it has to do with the weird blending mode I used for my background.) Normally, that would bother me, but for this project, it doesn't matter.

Now, since there is no way to specify a font for your form field in InDesign. We have to do that in Acrobat. So in Acrobat, open the form editing pane.

Select all the form fields (cy clicking and then shift+clicking). Then press Cmd/Ctrl + I.

(I like to think that I stands for Info. So when you click on any object in your PDF, if you press Cmd/Crl+ I, you'll get all sorts of interesting options that you change. Try it sometime for fun. You'd be surprised what you can change in a PDF!)

In the Appearance tab, change the font from Helvetica to something more interesting. The trick here is that you need to use a font that you have already used in your design. That'll mean that the beautiful, fun font that you want for your forms field is already embedded in the PDF. So it will work properly whenever this PDF is opened by someone who doesn't have the same font set as you. The fun font that I used is called GROBOLD.

Next, go to the Options tab in that same dialog box. Change the Alignment to Center.

Now, close that dialog box. Go to File > Document Properties (Ctrl/Cmd + D) and change page scaling to None. That way, the paper will print the size you designed it at, without you having to give any extra instructions to the office staff.

Now you are done! See how the type size automatically adjusts to fit the length of the name? Nifty!

Be sure to tell the office staff to open the PDF in Adobe Reader (not a web browser).

David Blatner wrote a great article awhile back about some limitations of Interactive PDFs. Adobe has fixed the spreads-vs-pages issue he mentions in the article, but everything else is still valid. It's a good read, if you want to know more about which PDF type is best suited for your jobs.

Why Does My CMYK Illustrator Document have a 4-color Default Black?

For months now, I have been plagued by an unusual Illustrator problem: 4 color default black. I've always been told pressing the letter D will revert the fill and stroke to their default colors. Like so:

Illustrator default black

But I have a vast collection of Illustrator documents which have a different default black. Instead of getting the expected result of 0, 0, 0, 100, Illustrator gives me this:

Mysterious 4-color default black

Early on, I assumed that perhaps I had made an amateur mistake of working in a RGB color space for my print documents. But nope.

I thought perhaps somehow the default black had gotten edited within the Illustrator master templates, so I checked those. But those all had the correct black definitions as well...

What plagued me about this problem was that it occurred on ALL the files for a particular project, and NEVER for any other project. So I figured that since all the files for this particular project were created from a single Illustrator template, the problem must be within that template. But all was seemingly correct with the template. It was a CMYK document, with CMYK swatches. What was interesting about this version of 4 color black was that it appeared to be a CMYK representation of an RGB black.

So, out of curiosity, I started at the beginning of the lifespan of a file, and created a bunch of new documents, using all the different New Document Profiles. Eventually, I was able to replicate the problem. The problem can be replicated by creating a new document using one of the RGB profiles and then changing the Color Mode (in the lower "Advanced" portion of the dialog box) to CMYK.

You see, you can use any of the new document profiles to create a CMYK document. The new document profiles come with a default color mode. But you can change it to whatever you want! However, these New Document Profiles correspond with actual .ai files that Illustrator uses to create new documents. Adobe has a good writeup about new document profiles here.

So if you start with an RGB file and simply change the document color mode to CMYK, Illustrator still remembers that the files started out as RGB. But since you changed the color mode to CMYK, Illustrator assumes that you want CMYK swatches, so it reinterprets those original RGB swatches and displays them as CMYK. 

So after months of wondering, I finally figured out the original source of the problem.

• I opened a screenshot (which is an RGB raster image) in Illustrator in order to trace it.
• I changed the color mode from RGB to CMYK.
• I added my own CMYK swatches and symbols.
• I saved this file as a template and created hundreds of other files from it.

But Illustrator still remembers that the original file was RGB. Of course, the original file as a screenshot, and had no swatches of its own to begin with. But it was RGB. And so forever more, this file, and all of its descendants, have a four-color black as their default.

So, the moral of the story is:

• If you have a CMYK workflow, don't open an RGB raster image in Illustrator. Instead, place the image into an new CMYK document.
• Alternatively, you can open an RGB image in Illustrator, but be sure to copy and paste it into a new CMYK document.

Author edit on 2-19-13: I recently included this at a lesson of the Raleigh InDesign User Group. Here is a video illustrating this blog post.