Acrobat Ink Manager

[phantasm]

Hi,

Hope somebody here has experience of using Acrobat's Ink Manager (I am currently using Acrobat 8). I have tried altering settings in the Ink Manager, but I seem unable to save the data with the PDF. Shouldn't this be possible?

Is the Ink Manager info saved as some form of XMP data?

Does anybody find the Ink Manager of any real use or do you tend to use more specialist systems? I tend to find the ink opacity options a bit limiting (I would prefer to state how opaque an ink is in terms of percentages, even though this would tend to be approximate).

Hope somebody can give some feedback! Thanks,

Nick

[Lukas Engqvist]

I have not had total success with the inkmanager…*I have used it at times to solve problems but often have had to fall back on other tools built into my RIP or Enfocus PitStop.
It does work if you re-fry a PDF (re-frying is going from PDF to Postscript to re-distill)
Acrobat 9 has reworked the Ink Manager, looks like it should work better but the tests I have done (trying to see if I can get Acrobat to reduce ink by doing CMYK-CMYK conversion have not been success full :( )

[phantasm]

Hi Lukas,

Many thanks for your response. Not very encouraging... I was hoping that there would be some way to create a PDF with the Ink Manager settings already applied so that when opened in Acrobat, the details remained.

Perhaps I will have to investigate another route.

As for you ink reduction methods, I recall quite a large post on PrintPlanet (http://printplanet.com/) forum discussing just this. You may have come across it before, but just in case, here the thread link:

http://printplanet.com/discuss/thread.jspa?threadID=1886

Hope this is of help,

Nick

[Lukas Engqvist]

I have not given upp on Acrobat9, with the preflight fixups and the more advanced colour management it should be possible… however the big problem remains when having a heavy image with a black overprint text ontop… as the ink limit tests ink limit before overprinting… as far as I know the only ink limit that analyses to see overprints and then does ink limits after is AGFAs in Rip InkLimit.

I'll keep you informed.

[phantasm]

Yes, please let me/us know of your progress.

Calculating an ink limit would be very hard taking overprinted objects into account (which really it must). Somehow the only overprinted areas of the underlying artwork would have to compensate. When the underlying artwork is a mix of bitmaps and vector, that could be painful without simply flattening everything. Therefore perhaps it's one of those processes most suited to a RIP?

Good luck,

Nick

[Lukas Engqvist]

This was one of my main babies at Drupa, so I did go and look at all the systems mentinioned, form Alwan to GMG and have tested Devicelinks too…*but the truth is that as of Drupa only AGFA did an overprint analysis to est InkLimit