Can I start off by saying 

I've got a (urgent, goes without saying these days) booklet that I need to tease out of Publisher, with full bleed background images. Every time I've tried to get a damn pdf out of it, it cuts the images into a million million pieces and does some other odd things to the colour. I've got all colour conversion turned off and told it to preserve transparency, but no dice. Usually the image slicing isn't so much of an issue but it's doing it very badly on this job.

Anybody come across this before and got a silver bullet for pdfs from publisher?

Hi, I've had a wee look round and the internet (and around Acrobat) but haven't worked out a good way of removing a spot colour from a job. Now and again I'll need to remove a spot colour that's been used to show a cutting forme on tabs for instance, I usually set it to white overprint but that's a bit kldugy for my taste.

Anyone able tell my dumb ass how to delete spot channels from a PDF?

  Me am run those. Running a DC240 and a DC260, along with a Epson9800POS sorry, PRO. Soon to be getting a 700. Anyone got any experience those ones? Other than horror stories about the recent toner shortage?

And who all is running digital production? A lot of litho shops seem to be putting in machines.

Looks like the way the wind is blowing, and although as far as I'm concerned those DCs are jumped photocopiers - I still spank some of the less diligent litho printers in terms of quality. When they're working.. which involves more hammer wielding threats, red-faced swearing and well-placed boots than I'd admit to the customers  :grin: That said you can adjust curves and o/p profiles without running a new set of plates, can do some fancy stuff with that.

I think is a slightly different job to prepress, get to be both pressman, and prepress in one. Allows you to do the just-sucked-a-lemon routine at the reps when they bring in a file made in an antique version of Corel, as well as the evil-eye-oh-god-is-he-about-to-knife-me looks when being interrupted during one of the many pitched battles with the printing equipment.

PS Missed this forum, got really sick of print for a while there and avoided all kinds of extra-curricular activity beyond just running the damn machines. Then I popped on back here for a wee browse and remembered why I loved reading some of the threads in this place...

Our guillotine at work has started to play silly buggers and is cutting diamond shaped instead of square, playing merry havoc with anything that needs folded after cutting.

I'm bringing in some tools tomorrow and I'm gonna resquare the backgauge, I know the rudiments of the process:

• Loosen two bolts either side of the centre pivot
• Loosen the centre pivot
• Swear.
• Finger tighten bolts
• Cut a sheet
• Swear
• Loosen bolt on left, tighten bolt on right (or vice versa) and cut another sheet
• Swear
• Adjust again and it still doesn't cut square
• Start drinking at 10am
• Rinse and repeat until it cuts square
• Tighten both adjustment bolts
• Tighten centre pivot
Job done.

Apparently. I'm thinking of folding the sheet in half, or rather, comparing the lengths of opposite sides to gauge how square the cut is.

Anybody done this before and have any top tips or pitfalls to avoid? Would be much appreciated.

PS We got an Ideal 4850-95 (don't laugh).

Well the first thing is its all an illusion. Your brain just makes it up, calibrating itself with in-line spectrophotometers. Well maybe not, but it certainly works on some sort of human-wide consensus. A study was done asking people to 'tune' a colour (you can tune a colour, but you can't tuna fish) ie. get the yellow so that it is not greeny-yellow, or reddy-yellow and the results from a wide variety of individuals were within spitting distance of each other. That's quite a thing, however the really amazing thing is the ratio of rods and cones, and the sensitivities, distributions and 'colour balance' of the eyes of the subjects varied hugely. So apparently we have come to some sort of a consensus as to what 'yellow' is and so on.

http://www.biotele.com/color_perception.html

As prepress people we'll all be familiar with our CMYK. I found it surprising that Magenta ain't a colour, it's simply masquerading as one. It has no place in the spectrum! It is an illusion that our brains hash together to make sense of a mix of wavelengths. In fact it seems that most colours are a representation of composite wavelengths.

http://www.biotele.com/color_brain.html
http://www.biotele.com/magenta.html (enjoy the disappearing colours around the dot)

And finally I gotta mention metameric colours. The gist is that two colours can match under one set of conditions and not under another. It's all due to substrate and texture, and the type of light that's reflecting off them. Or something.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,13764,00.asp



So next time you get a job bounced for bad colour you can tell them -

1) It's all an illusion
2) You have the wrong type of eyes
3) You have the wrong type of lights - it's metamerism
4) That's not even a real colour anyway

Hi I've just got a business card through from one of our regular clients. The card is for an overseas trade guy and he works in the middle east, one side is in her majesty's english and the other is in Arabic. I've been supplied with a PDF of the translation as well as a word doc.

For now I just dropped the PDF into the business card, however I tried pasting the arabic text into quark as well as importing it and it ain't reading it properly, won't write from right to left. Is there a way to use Arabic text properly in Quark without Xtensions? I'm on 7.31.

Cheers

Being a bit of a one-man show here (it's just a small digital shop) I didn't have anyone to show me PitStop Pro. Believe it or not we work mainly with PDFs and it was sitting on its CD uninstalled for ages! I've been working through the features and it's been a revelation, no more PDF editing in Illustrator (bad bad dark days).

During my exploration of the menus I noticed the Add Penguin. Now I know that a roller banner is called a penguin in teh colloquial - so I used to press the 'Add Penguin' button in Pitstop and see if I could work out what it did. It wasn't until I clicked it on a very low coverage file that I realised..

..it adds a penguin.

Best feature.

Hi, been lurking around these forums for a while - have spat coffee all over my keyboard a couple of times reading some of your threads. You're all obviously kept very busy at work  :smiley:

I got a question about colour calibration that I'd appreciate some help with, pretty much as the thread title says.

The printer was 'calibrated' a long time ago (before I joined the company at any rate) and since then we've started running different stocks and our old queues just don't cut the mustard - in terms of ink coverage and colour. The machine is used for high-quality production and does not need to be matched to the output of anything else (it is currently set up to ape a SWOP Press - waste of all that gamut).

Now my boss CAN get a lend of a spectrophotometer to calibrate with, and the RIP is bundled with the appropriate tools. However he's been told that "it would waste days and days if you don't know what you're doing". Now I'm the first to admit I obviously don't have a clue what I'm doing, I guess I must just be consistently lucky at my job or something..

The last time the printer was set up, they got the stocks and played around with the bundled profiles until the colours 'looked sorta right. and stuff.' I think this process would be more difficult than using the proper equipment and er, following the straightforward instructions. I however, haven't ever calibrated a machine using a spectrophotometer before, and this brings us to the crux of the issue-

R can u halp mee  2 cablirate plz?

If I insisted on the spectrometer would I end up looking like a fool and wasting days? Does anyone else have experience in calibrating wide format ink jet? Any tips/hints/suggestions/money would be appreciated.