Didn't find any option to evaluate colorspace information...

[MalKontent]

Hi all,

I'm in offset printing business and PDF is the only format we accept artwork in for printing.

Our Customer Service needs to check two things in incoming files: the trimmed size, and number of colors used.

Our PrePress uses a couple of full Adobe Acrobat Pro with PitStop for thorough checking/adjustment of files, but installing Acrobat Pro for every CS person would not make much sense. This is the first viewer that lets them evaluate the TrimBox (if defined), and measure the trim size as a distance between the crop marks (if the TrimBox is not defined). An added bonus is to see if the bleed is properly prepared.

Functionality I'm looking for is the ability to check how many colors are used throughout the file: is it Black only, CMYK, or CMYK with some spot colors (Pantone etc.). Of course, if there are any RGB objects, it should tell so as well, to alarm that the file is not print-ready.

A feature like in Acrobat, where you have an "eyedropper" tool, telling you the percentages of every color under the cursor would be a great addition as well.

Is anything like that planned?

With best regards
Stanislaw

[Ivan - Tracker Software]

I think support of Adobe's plugins will be realized before this specific request.

[MalKontent]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

As good as it sounds for everyone, this won't help me in particular ...

Showing which separations are present in the file is in the basic functionality of Acrobat Pro, and plugins that do the same thing (and more) cost a lot, while 95% of their functionality is not needed by our Customer Service girls .
I'm looking for a tool that does just that and not much more, while keeping the costs down.

Hope this can be put somewhere on the wish list

I don't think I'm the only person who would like to implement this viewer in a graphics/printing support environment and would appreciate colour information being available...

I'll do my best to make it popular once this functionality becomes available

Stanislaw

[MalKontent]

Hi guys,

Any news on this front?

With best regards
Stan

[Paul - PDF-XChange]

Hi MalKontent

not implemented yet I'm afraid. There have been many feature improvements but this one is still behind major development requirements like support for Portfolios and embedded files.

We appreciate your patience, the team is hard at work making your viewer even better, sorry this feture is not yet addressed.

regards

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

A feature like in Acrobat, where you have an "eyedropper" tool, telling you the percentages of every color under the cursor would be a great addition as well.

This is easily done with any third-party tool. I recommend FastStone Capture (the free version 5.3 will do) as it has many useful features to complement the PDF Viewer.

[Chris - PDF-XChange]

Thanks Bhikkhu

[MalKontent]

That's a pity, as we would gladly pay for several Pro licenses if the Viewer finally got such feature, and - I'm sure - so would many printing houses, where there's a need to quickly establish the trimmed size and the number of colours on pages, enabling them to prepare a valid quotation.

We need a solid, widely compatible PDF viewer, with 1) simple rectangular measurements and 2) separations preview capabilities. And we are ready to pay for it, although surely not as much as a dozen licenses of full Acrobat Pro, which for this purpose would be tremendous overkill...
I can't understand why there's no such product???

Stan

[MalKontent]

A feature like in Acrobat, where you have an "eyedropper" tool, telling you the percentages of every color under the cursor would be a great addition as well.

This is easily done with any third-party tool.

Well, unfortunately you are wrong

This, or any other such tool, will not show you the colours of a particular PDF object, in this object's colorspace (be it CMYK, DeviceN, RGB, Lab or variants), but instead it will show you the resulting monitor RGB values of the content rendered on the screen, which is basically useless.

I need info about what's in the PDF, not what this PDF produces on the screen, because I will be printing the contents, and not the monitor image...

Stan

[Chris - PDF-XChange]

Understood. I believe Photoshop which has native PDF support, as it is an Adobe product, has that functionality, just a thought

[Paul - PDF-XChange]

So the word from the dev team is that it has been added the 'request list'. It will most likely be in the form of a plugin and so obviously the plugin functionality has to be completed first. I can give no commitment if this will be 2 or 10 builds away <gazes expectantly into crystal Ball> ooh! look at that!... </gaze> but know that this has been raised in our priorities and will happen.

[MalKontent]

So the word from the dev team is that it has been added the 'request list'. It will most likely be in the form of a plugin and so obviously the plugin functionality has to be completed first. I can give no commitment if this will be 2 or 10 builds away [...] but know that this has been raised in our priorities and will happen.

Well, this is some good news today

If you look at the Separations Manager/Ink Manager in Adobe Acrobat Pro - this is the maximum functionality, allowing each separation to be individually switched on/off (and result previewed, for example helping to find out whether some extra separation is actually used in any object on the page, or is just there because someone forgot to delete it - happens all the time!...).
But even simple information about the color separations on a given page, without on/off toggle etc. would be valuable and most welcome (and enough for us to purchase Pro licenses, and recommend it to everyone in this business).

Keeping my fingers crossed
Stan

[MalKontent]

One more thing.

Typical everyday PDF files (manuals, brochures, leaflets, web documents etc.) are RGB documents that have little to do with graphics industry print-ready files.

If you need samples of various artwork files the printing industry works with, I can supply them for reference & testing.
I can supply PDFs with CMYK objects, with CMYK and RGB objects (which is something I would love to be able to discover, as this is against the specifications), CMYK + one or more special colors (PANTONE/PMS colors or special separations like cutting die outline for example), black/grey only (K), or just 2-3 color separations without full CMYK. Also, for page-by-page testing, I can provide files with different colour models on subsequent pages (for example front - CMYK + one spot color, back - CMYK only, or front - CMYK, back - grey [black, K] etc.

I would also be happy to beta-test

Regards
Stan

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hey MalKontent,

thanks for the help offered. Our dev team is pretty busy at this time, but when the work on this begins we will keep you informed and will most certainly take advantage of some good examples.

Regards,
Stefan

[MalKontent]

Hi All,

Any good news for me?

Cheers
Stan

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hey Stan,

Unfortunately no good news yet.
We have devoted the next build to bug fixing and all the work on new features is at halt for the time being.

Please bear with us and we will keep you updated once work on new features is resumed.

Best,
Stefan

[MalKontent]

How about now?

Any chances for that functionality anytime soon?

Cheers
Stan

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hi Stan,

development is well under way, but the efforts are now focused on ver3. When it is available we will support third party plugins (and the available Adobe ones should work), so you should be able to install your PitStop there.

Expect the earliest betas of ver3 in spring 2010.

Regards,
Stefan

[MalKontent]

Hi,

Thanks for the info.

PitStop is an advanced toolkit, having much more functionality and costing more than Acrobat Pro itself, so having an ability to install it would not be much of an advantage to us.

The basic functionality the print/graphics community needs is built into the core Acrobat - it's called Output Preview, with two important options: separations, showing the colorants used in the file (with an option to turn any of them off/on), and Object Inspector, showing properties of a selected object (or objects, if several are on top of each other). As it is part of the standard Acrobat Pro, there are no such plugins I know of that do the same thing.

On the graphics workstations we have Acrobat Pro and Pitstop purchased and installed. What I'm looking for is an inexpensive possibility for everybody dealing with production files to establish at a quick glance the colour specifications of any given file. It has to be inexpensive if every Customer Service and production management person is to get one...

Regards and still having hope
Stan