How can I get FM to stop changing my CMYK colours?

Question

I have a FM file that I need to set the text to a specific CMYK colour (90-0-49-0).

I have set this colour in FM, however when I print my PDF file - the CMYK values are changed.

I understand this is because FM runs the file through the Windows printer driver that converts to RGB.

Is there a fix for this issue in the more recent versions of FM?

If not - does anyone know how I can get FM to produce a PDF without changing my CMYK colour values?

I am using FM 7.2.

Thank you.

Be.eM · Answer

Starting with FrameMaker 10 (latest updates) and later versions, FrameMaker has an alternative "CMYK engine" for PDF output which does actually write correct CMYK values to PDF. As I understand it, this CMYK engine is partially based on very old postscript programming code, so it may have issues which sometimes require the old Windows PS/RGB output as a fallback option. This may be the case when using some open type fonts which are not getting written correctly to PDF (we have that issue e.g. with the Meta Pro font) , and font related "fake" functions like "bolded, obliqued" also fail to make it to PDF with the CMYK option enabled.

Before FM had this option, we always used Acrobat plugins like PitStop to convert to correct CMYK colors. And for images, EPS has always allowed getting correct CMYK output, even through the Windows PS engine, because these files are just pushed through the engine without getting touched by it.

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