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Counting color vs. black pages?

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Does Acrobat Pro (or if not, InDesign or within Fiery Command Workstation) have a way to count all the pages of a book and give me a report of how many black pages and color pages a document has? This is important when using a printer that charges by clicks. The only way I currently can do this is to run a book on the printer first and use the onscreen counter on the printer to know the number of color and black pages. This of course means I am wasting a printed book when I am only trying to put a price quote together first.

Elizabeth Klenda

Participant

I think I found it. Acrobat Pro, Preflight. Single Checks (magnifying glass): under "pages" menu is "Page uses other colorants than black". Seemed to work for me.

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Community Expert

Community Expert

Thank you for sharing that solution!

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Technical Generalist

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Unfortunately there is no standardised way to determine whether a page has colour. For example, which of these are colour

- a page using only DeviceGray (shades of greyscale)

- a page using CMYK, but only with markings in the K channel

- a page using CMYK, only in K, but using a different CMYK profile so the colour is converted (or might not be converted, depending on the printer)

- a page using RGB which has all the R=G=B values equal

- a page which, once converted as needed for that device, and rendered, sets only black ink

Etc. Etc. Even when a printer has different routing or charging for colour vs black only, you cannot know exactly how the decision will be made.

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Participant

In Arobat DC use preflight tool-> digital printing (color)

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Community Expert

Community Expert

Hi,

I believe you can accomplish this using javascript to create an action with the Action Wizard tool.

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Technical Generalist