Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
My printer requires me to provide a PDF file, in CMYK format, with 3mm bleed - I don't think that Pages offers this sort of option - am I correct?
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3), iWork Pages
Not directly.
You have to manually construct a 10mm margin with crop marks around the document and use 3mm of that for the bleed. Something I have not had to do since the 1980's.
Pages does output to cmyk but there are problems if you go to pdf with transparency which includes, shadows, reflections, some frames and direct transparency with bitmaps.
Pages is designed to output to desktop printers. Some users have successfully gone to commercial printers, mainly inhouse with direct output from Pages to the RIP. As there are problems with managing colors and no tools to verify everything is printable, I consider Pages the wrong tool for the job.
Peter
Henrik,
Thanks for your response - perhaps I should be asking some more questions of my printer before the next print run is performed.
Colin
You could use it to make a template working for A5.
> Thanks for your response - perhaps I should be asking some more questions of my printer before the next print run is performed.
Certainly.
No matter in what software application you separate, whether image by image in the Apple ColorSync Utility (which will separate individual TIFF and save the separation to disk tagged with the ICC profile which which the separation was done), or image by image in Adobe Photoshop, or in an aggregator software application such as newer versions of QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign or Apple Pages for that matter, the colours which will be formed, and the colourants which will form them, are contained in the ICC profile for the paper/ink/press condition.
Please be aware of the principle that preseparated data that is not defined by an ICC profile is tacitly assigned an ICC profile. In other words, no matter what aggregating software application your pages are assembled in, if you yourself don't tag the image data with its ICC profile, application intelligence will argue as follows, "OK, this data object is (CMYK, RBG, Gray - pick one), the data object is not defined by an ICC profile, therefore, a default ICC profile for the colourant format (CMYK, RGB, Gray - pick one) will be assigned."
If this is not done in the aggregating software application, it is done in the system software (Apple Mac OS X, for instance) or in the RIP. The reason is that the press operator can't hope to control production on the press if on the given page the image data top left, top right, bottom left and bottom right is all wildly incorrect for the actual printing condition, some with too low ink limits, others with too high ink limits, some with too yellow and others with too blue or to red graybalance, and so on and so forth.
So in the production process there is always somewhere, somehow, a solution that harmonises / unifies the separations. Not so long ago, in the late nineteen-eighties and early nineteen-nineties, this was done manually by the press operator who recalibrated the ink keys on the press. These days the idea is not to recalibrate the ink keys all the time, but to hold the ink keys to a constant calibration and let the ICC colour management system change the colourants in order to fit the printing condition, and, of course, in order to form the intended colours. This should be elementary common sense after so much time and work, but the story seems still to need some retelling -:).
/hh
Providing PDF files to printer with bleed !
