Avoiding Word to PDF Color Shift for Prepress

Question

Hello forum,I am faced with the task of generating a print-ready PDF from a book written in Word. I am having trouble getting satisfactory CMYK color output.  I have both Mac and Windows machines running Word and Acrobat DC. I've chosen to use the Mac because I seemed to get closer to a good final product. I've learned: I must change all text colored "Automatic" to black instead.Word's CMYK color slider on the Mac does not correspond to PDF output when using "Save as PDF." Adjusted (also not accurate) sRGB values are output.I cannot get 100% black text using "Save as Adobe PDF" in my output unless my default Distiller settings are set to no color conversion so I am assuming it is essentially the same as my chosen Workflow, which is:File>Print and "Save as PDF" from the PDF dropdown. In Acrobat, Convert all elements to GRACol 2006 with "Use Document Intent" and "preserve black" selected. Convert entire document is not available.Then in a separate step, I convert again with the same settings and I embed the GRACol profile. For a reason unknown to me, doing it in 2 steps has better results than converting and embedding in a single step. My black is 100% black after this but my colors are slightly adjusted.Then I manually edit a few figures and tables that don't survive the conversion in Illustrator.This is the workflow that has the least negative affect on the colors used throughout the document, although it does adjust the colors slightly when converting to GRACol... for example 95/85/0/0 becomes 97/73/2/0.  The printer's supplied joboptions file doesn't even convert from RGB, so I'm not too picky on what I give them. From what I gather, it's just for flattening. I just want to send a PDF with CMYK mixes and an output intent that I feel has a predictable rip outcome to common outputs based on my past experiences and I want to avoid 4-color text.Can anyone suggest a better workflow? Is there a conversion profile choice that won't change colors at all?Thanks!

Dov Isaacs · Answer

Generally speaking, you will get much better results dealing with Office applications on Windows in terms of PDF creation, especially with color issues.

I will assume that you use Acrobat's PDFMaker Save as Adobe PDF with Microsoft Office applications on Windows. Use the High Quality Print settings as they will likely yield the best results in general. All fonts are embedded. Black and gray text and vector objects (i.e., R=G=B values) yield DeviceGray PDF which should yield the equivalent of CMYK=(0,0,0,1-G) eliminating problems of rich black text and at least Office-native vector graphics. (The PDF creation on MacOS doesn't do this!)

With these settings, any raster images placed in the Office document passthrough with their original ICC profiles intact!

At that point you have a perfectly fine PDF file with tagged RGB, grayscale for text and vector, and live transparency. Most decent printers should be able to take that and let their RIP deal with the conversion to GRACol. If you wanted to get fancy, conceivably you could convert the PDF file in Acrobat Pro DC to PDF/X-4 with a GRACol output intent (don't convert colors, though).

The bigger concern tends to be dealing with Office colors, i.e., those bright garish, out-of-gamut blues, greens, etc. assumed to be in ICC sRGB color. The gamut issue is not readily solved. Conceivably one could hack around with a specialized CMYK profile that would map those out-of-gamut “Office colors” to pleasing CMYK, but you might find that a bit beyond what you really want to get into.

- Dov

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