Color separation when exporting a PDF

Show them in print preview (Acrobat Pro or InDesign) the separate plates. You can turn of and on single plates.

In the 2 years since you made this original post, has your workflow changed?

Dan's #10 is the proper—and not very difficult—workflow. Exporting plates is never going to happen, so the only other options are Distiller or a script.

At InDesign print dialog, options related to Color Management, Color Separation, and Graphics options are disabled

The help text states that separations are disabled so it doesn't sound like it would help.

Besides, Adobe should be here to help and not tell me how to work... a simple separation option on export would be great

It doesn't seem like Adobe will have any interest in a print feature that addresses a layout problem. The InDesign SDK and scripting tools make this very solvable from the layout rather than the print side. I didn't spend much time with the script I posted and it probably would have problems with complex groups, but there are other ways of going at the problem. A script could also hide every page item that isn't a text frame containing text with the 5th color. That might be better because it wouldn't change the layout structure.

Dov Isaacs wrote: On behalf of Adobe ... Adobe applications including InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop intentionally omitted the capability of initiating a pre-separated PDF workflow. Although one could hack together a pre-separated PDF file by producing PDF via distillation of PostScript (another workflow that we at Adobe most strongly discourage), the concept behind modern PDF publishing workflows is to leave final form content at the highest level of abstraction until it needs to be rendered, whether that rendering is on screen (an inherently RGB device), to 4 colorant CMYK process printing, or high fidelity printing using traditional CMYK colorants plus other colorants such as bright green and orange or light cyan and light magenta as well. Once you pre-separate PDF, you can't really display the PDF for normal reading, you can't readily search and/or touch up, and you can't change the target printing condition. You also cannot have live transparency in a pre-separated PDF file! And modern native PDF RIPs don't work with such workflows! No ISO PDF/X standard supports such workflows either! You want or need to preview the separations? Use the separation preview feature of Acrobat (or even the authoring applications). If you are working with a Luddite print service provider who demands such PDF files or creates them internally, you really need to very seriously consider other print service providers.           - Dov

Seems like Adobe is missing the point here.

Read my real life need for it above and you will see that it makes a lot of sense to have this option that I am asking for.  Not all files are perfect, therefor the export in separation mode is just a time saver.

That would be, "even Quark use to have this option." Quark in all their wisdom yanked host-based separations in version 10. They may put it back in due to popular request/demand. Only the Shadow knows. I quite often use QXP 9.x for making the seps for a couple local screen printers when the jobs aren't basic vector art done in CorelDraw.

MW

I know the color separation has been removed in Quark, but in printing.  It's still available in the export option. 

Using the export method in quark, you can select the colour you want to export.  That's a beautiful thing. That's about the only thing good in that program.... anyway back to indesign

You’re asking for fairly archaic things here. You can put in a feature request but you’d need to explain how this would benefit the entire user base and IMO you’re going to have a rough time doing so.

Bob, it might be archaic, but it's still used a lot in the publishing world. 

in the book world, the new trend is for firms to do books in a co-edition format. The idea is to have one firm do all the work (normally in english). But then other firms from other countries and other languages will simply send a PDF of the text ONLY without the colors (cmyk).  So when I export the PDF I only need ONE color. I do not wish to export the whole CMYK.

Do you understand where I am getting from.

So in simplified terms.  The printer has 4 plates for the colours of the book and will simply change a 5th plate to the desired language.

5000 copies

CMYK plates

5th plate: german text

10 000 copies

French

exactly the same CMYK plates as german

5th plate: switch to the french plate

50 000 copies

English

exactly the same CMYK plates as german

5th plate: switch to the english plate

and so on....

The cost is greatly reduced for everyone, but we need an option to export the TEXT only.

You will simply say, but have the text in a separate layer. That is true, but in reality, it's not all the files that are built like that and most graphic designers will have the text on a separate spot color instead of a separate layer.  Unfortunately when I receive the file it's too late to do the changes.

I hope I make sense, english is not my first language.

Jefferey, that's what I thought. The problem with postscript is that it's getting outdated and sometimes doesn't do a good job.

I looked in the output tab, but it doesn't work.