PDF in CMYK color space?

Yes, the reason many of us use a Macintosh instead of XWindows is that we do not want to think.

Yvan's point bears mention, namely that there is no such thing as a zipless interface. There are general conventions you need to understand and there are conventions specific to your choice of application that you also need to understand. If you do not understand the general conventions, you have little chance of understanding the conventions specific to your chosen application.

One such basic convention in ICC colour management is which rendering intent to select from source RGB ICC colour spaces to destination ICC CMYK colour space for the printing condition. That should be set to Perceptual which produces softclipping in the shadows instead of linear clipping, and is the rendering intent designated in the original framework for this purpose.

Setting the rendering intent to Relative Colorimetric is setting the rendering intent to one of two proofing transforms, this one without paper white simulation. "So, my missing manual for Adobe software says to set RC." Well, Adobe has a non-standard rendering intent, RC with black point compensation, which is backward compatible with Adobe's obsolete PostScript CMS.

If you line up two versions of the selfsame model shot with delicate hair detail, setting Perceptual will preserve the delicate detail better than setting Relative Colorimetric with BPC. And if RC with BPC is not supported by the ICC implementation you are using, you will get RC without BPC and that is not what you want to get. So, there are no simple answers.

In technical terms, what manner of beast are the PDF filters in ColorSync? The answer to this is that Apple has provided fairly powerful fallback ICC functionality since ColorSync 2.1. In that timeframe the Apple ColorSync Plugins offered ICC support for raster imaging in Adobe Photoshop, which was not colour managed until version 6, and presently the ColorSync PDF filters provide ICC support for any application that uses the system services for colour management.

/hh

Magnus,

The power of the Macintosh has always been that simplicity.

I am in a profession, design, which is a monument to the power of that approach. It allowed designers to gain huge productivity improvements and to stretch ourselves into new more intricate areas and skills which were only made possible by the relative simplicity and clarity of the Mac.

Others have difficulty in seeing the value or purpose of this approach, which introduces minimalism to processes. It is the difference between an engineer who straps complications upon complications and the industrial designer who pares down functions to their essentials and tidies them up to reveal their operation out of the chaos.

My design career has centred around a great deal of information design, which takes into account not only the processes themselves but the humans who interact with them. It is an enormous struggle to have clients step out of the trees to see the forest.

I know where I am then work down to +exactly where+ I am with a good idea of my surrounds. Many people have no idea of how things fit together and need the steps to get from A to Z with instructions as to what choices to make at each fork on the way. Terms such as take the best, shortest, common choice are meaningless if given 2 or more closed doors, unlabelled or obscurely named, and having to choose one.

Good instructions take these choices into account and question whether they can be used by someone who does not know what the instructor knows and does not presume pre-existing knowledge.

You might notice that my instructions are accompanied by not just the exact path to the choices but where to start on that path eg "Menu", "Toolbar", "Inspector" or "Right mouse button click". I learnt this from when I was an instructor. It is easy to forget that not everyone knows where to begin.

Also whilst some theory may be good, it only has meaning with experience.

Further you must use a language that is comprehendible. +Ornithoptera euphorion+ means something to a few, +Cairns Birdwing+ a bit more to others, butterfly to nearly everyone. In other words call a spade a spade and not a manually operated sedimentation extractive implement.

Finally make sure the instructions are accurate and actually lead somewhere. Don't send the pupil to buy striped paint at your local supermarket, when there is no such thing and they don't stock paint anyway.

To sum it up, put yourself into the recipient's shoes and try and anticipate the problems they may have. If you have not been able to explain a process in simple terms the failure is yours not the listeners.

Good instructions take these choices into account and question whether they can be used by someone who does not know what the instructor knows and does not presume pre-existing knowledge.

True, but you are missing the point here.

ICC profiles, TIFF raster files, and PDF object-oriented raster and vector files pass between applications with widely varying interfaces and interface terminologies. Further, when I set up a design space to save out a PDF printing master, I have to talk to the person at the printing machinery and the postproduction machinery to set up my printing master. We are not talking about Pages in isolation since Pages is a client of system-level ICC imaging services, nor even of the PDF filters in ColorSync in isolation since I have to key in information there that is completely beyond anything Apple can predict in advance. If you expect a guide that assumes Apple can anticipate the colour space and the wider issues of the printing and postprocessing machinery, or that all applications use the terminology used in Apple applications, then again you should have a colour consultant set up your workflow for you. I am sure there are professional print shops in any part of the world that will advise on a colour consultant, or will advise themselves through their prepress departments. We can go into all of this, by all means, but if you then tell me you want all of this autoconfigured in Apple Mac OS X, then we will have gone ahead for no good reason. You can always ask on the ColorSync Users List, and you will get answers that you probably do not understand either. /hh

Henrik,

I don't want to offend you, but have you ever been able to explain anything, even the simplest of processes to anyone?

You have an amazing ability to never get to the point. We have spent entire threads where you have never got on subject, no matter how we circled around it.

I can not believe I finally, after considerable effort, got you to admit using the ColorSync Utility to define bleeds etc didn't work, despite that was your "solution" more than once.

For the average poster here, all these convoluted "explanations" are just unusable gobbledygook.

Sorry, I know you mean well.

I don't want to offend you

Not to worry, I'm not offended.

Meanwhile, I did not "admit using the ColorSync Utility to define bleeds etc didn't work." What I told you was that you have to talk to the operator of the imposition software to find out what he has to say about the postprocessing options. In time, what you want will be implemented through job tickets so that the print shop with or without bindery can send you the settings as a plug and play file. /hh

Oh well, I didn't even get that one! 🙂