CMYK output

From the "Print..." dialog, select "ColorSync" from the "Copies & Pages" pop-up. Choose "Add Filters" from the "Quartz Filter:" pop-up. Open the "Filter Inspector" from the ColorSync preview toolbar. Duplicate the Generic PDFX-3 filter, and edit as necessary.

Daniel:

Is this question only about export, or is it perhaps an oversight, or are you using Pages 1 - which I'm afraid I've removed from my system and cannot answer for? However Pages 2 does have sliders for Grey Scale, RGB, CMYK and HSB (hue, saturation and brightness) in the colour palette you can bring up from either the colours icon, or from anything in the Inspector that involves the selection of colour. It's a little bit hidden, since you have to click on the scroll-like triangles under the sample colour.

When you first install Pages 2 I seem to recall that this is set to RGB, but after you've used it it will show your last choice. Sorry if that's not your problem, but it's not always easy to tell from a question what has been tried and what hasn't. On the other hand, I have noticed that if you let the cursor rest on the colour sample I've mentioned, it does say "Device RGB", regardless of the sliders used to generate a colour, and it may well be that Pages does lack the capacity to generate CMYK colours; instead transposing them to an RGB equivalent. If this is the case, and you have colour profiles that have been generated in CMYK, it may be possible to import these from the options available under the spectrum and palette icons in the colour selector. Whether these would also become translated to RGB or be left as CMYK you might find indicated by resting your cursor on the colour sample as described.

I have no such palettes to test, but a trial might be revealing.

If you find no solution at all, please put in feedback via the Pages main menu. I feel sure that Apple would treat this seriously. It really should be possible to generate actual CMYK palettes from within Pages itself.

Best wishes.

iBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.4)

I think Brie Fly may be right. You haven't said how you created the PDF. Was it PDF-X? let us know the result

Daniel & Brie Fly:

I'm learning something from this. It's my printer that's limited to RGB, but in time I'll want to output to better, and I do see other profiles in the colour sync options. So I'll know where to look when the time comes.

Thanks.

If you are doing this because you want to have something commercially printed and the printer requested a CMYK file, this workflow is not going to make the print shop happy. Proper CMYK conversion is a fairly complex task that requires understanding (and having very specific information about) things like emulsions and paper profiles. In the long run, it will save everyone time and aggravation if you just ask the printer to do the conversion for you.

If that isn't why, then what exactly are you doing that you think you need a CMYK file to do it? The odds are you are just making things more complicated without doing anything to improve your output, if you are printing at home.

If you have them, try opening in photoshop or other high end package to see if in CMYK

Barbara, Im assuming the the OP needs a file that will separate into CMYK so a printer can make film separations. The printer will worry about the details surely?

No, unfortunately, that is kind of like saying, "The Printer asked for a TIFF file that is 300 ppi at 3" x 5", but you can give him a 400 x 600 pixel JPEG and let him worry about the details."

There is a difference between converting a color profile and retagging a file, which I think is all that is happening here, and even under ideal conditions creating color separations is a complex techinical task. Believe me, the printer will take it, maybe, but he will not thank you for this and you will almost certainly not be pleased with what you get back from him, because merely changing the color tag on a file (as opposed to making a true conversion) can cause pretty massive color shifting.

Even working with InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, making color seps is not for the faint of heart or those who don't know exactly what they are doing. Converting to CMYK is quite a bit more complicated than, say, changing from sRGB to Adobe RGB.

The OP should talk to his printer at greater length about what is required here.

If you really want to understand this, I would suggest a peruse of "Real World Color Management" by Bruce Fraser, or at least the chapters on CMYK conversion in Richard Lynch's "Hidden Power of Photoshop Elements" book.

EDIT You need to understand that CMYK colors will be different from RGB colors, and you almost always have to do some significant correction to rebalance things. If your printer only gets an uncorrected CMYK file from you, he has no way to know what things are supposed to look like.

Daniel might be able to save himself a lot of time if he just asks the printer what they would charge to do the conversion for him.

Barbara is absolutely right. I can't tell you how right she is. You do not want to be doing CMYK conversions yourself. Get your printers to split the PDF you gave them.
Think of it this way . . . RGB = Red Green Blue - the colours of the dots that make up your display. Your display knows what colour to show by varying the intensity of the three different types of dots that make up the display.
On the other hand CMYK = Cyan Magenta Yellow and Black (K = Black). The colours of the four different plates that, when composited (printed on top of each other) produce the full-colour image.
In other words, there is a massive difference between the way your colours are reproduced on screen, and the way they are printed.
As you can imagine switching between the two different methods of repoducing colour is fraught with a multitude of pitfalls.
Not knowing your way around those pitfalls results in - THE WRONG COLOURS BEING PRINTED.
Pay someone who knows what they are doing to get it right for you.

Thanks Barbara:

I notice you're a long standing contributor, and I'll be guided by what you say.

RGB doesn't yield quite the colours I want for titles and majuscules, but I don't think my inks are up to it either. Nor can I get quite the paper I'd like, so I'm setting up for an A5 book, which I hope I can get bound for a small pre-publication run. But then I'll be looking for a publisher and / or printer to come up with the finishing touches; perhaps with some illustrations as well.

I'm encouraged by your confidence that such things can be handled.

I want Pages to show my intention, and to produce an author's edition.

Regards.

Well, I'm afraid, if you're doing a book that includes graphic illustrations, it's not that simple. Pages is excellent for setting up a manuscript, but I wouldn't expect to get all the way through production with just Pages (or with just Word or any other word processor.)

I'll give you an example: For O'Reilly, I work in a hugely complex Word template, which means that when I send the manuscript, it's already nearly totally formatted as the text is going to appear. But although I do this, and send in very carefully corrected photos for the figures, it still gets torn apart by production--the graphics go out to the artists who do the color seps and recorrect them for CMYK, the text goes to someone who goes through and substitutes any symbols they have their own in-house font for (like the symbols for the various keystrokes). Then the whole thing is put into Framemaker, a color pdf is made of the final layout, and that is sent to me for final proofing, both of text and graphics color, before it gets plated, or if we're in a real hurry, I get a grayscale pdf and separate large sheets of the graphics to check.

I'm not saying you couldn't do this, just that it's a large complex task if you want to include color. A novel wouldn't be that hard to do.

In your case, I would suggest maybe investing in a good photo quality printer and a cheap laser for the text. I have often printed brochures and such by making two copies of the file, one with the b&w stuff and one with the graphics, and running once through the laser for the text and once through my inkjet for the graphics.

If you are doing this at home, rather than CMYK, you need: 1. a good quality printer (canon or epson would be my choice), 2.the right ink and paper for that particular printer, or you can convert the file all day long and it will look lousy when printed.

For the published version, that's what publishers and graphic artists get paid for. If I were to publish a printed book myself, I'd definitely factor hiring someone who knows about production to help with the layout/final file/color sep process.

EDIT I should mention that there are several active maling lists for self-publishing authors, where you can find knowledgeable help from people who've done just what you want to do. I would definitely investigate joining one of them. It could save you a lot of tiime and grief looking for publishers, artists, supplies, etc. (I might point out that distribution is the toughest part of self-publishing, much more so than creating the physical book.)

Barbara:

Thank you ever so much for your insight into the process. I'll have time to follow it up in the hours it's unreasonable to press on with writing. But the words do come first, and I want to get a presentable copy of those into my State library before I deal with the rest of it. Ah, but then, if I can finish something I'm happy with before the editors start quibbling - I'll remember your help when I deal with them. Or use it to send them packing if they get too obstreporous!

Cheers.

Pages 2 does have CMYK sliders in its color manager. This means that if you had colored type, tables, or fills Pages could make it CYMK.

As far as photographs, since Pages isn't a photo editing program, why not do the RGB to CMYK conversion outside of Pages? I rarey destroy my original photo files that come out of my camera as RGB Jpeg's. I put them into Photoshop, convert them to TIF files (so that they won't degrade when I edit them); do whatever editing/cropping/adjusting needs to be done; and then change the mode to CMYK.

Using this process keeps my commercial printers happy. And saves me a lot of headaches.

iMac G5, iBook G3 Mac OS X (10.4.4)

iMac G5, iBook G3 Mac OS X (10.4.4)

All the best, Max. I hope it's a best-seller!