Preflight - Change Pantone C's to Pantone U's

Report · Jul 26, 2017

Hi.

We (like all printers) often receive files that will be printed on Uncoated stock, but are set up using the Pantone Coated swatch library, and thus have the 'C' suffix in their name.

What I'd like to do is create a Preflight profile that changes those C swatches to their U counterpart. I can do each colour in a PDF manually, using a 'Map Spot and Process Colours' fixup, then a 'Normalize Spot Color Appearance' fixup to get a more accurate appearance, but I'd like to be able to run one profile that catches any and all 'PANTONE XXX C's and changes their name and appearance to their corresponding 'PANTONE XXX U's.

Is this possible?

Thanks.

Report · Jul 28, 2017

I can do this easily in PitStop Pro using a pre-built action “Change spot color suffix” or even with a spot colour rename action that leverages regular expressions –

Find: (PANTONE\s.*)C

Replace: $1U

The name is easy enough to batch automate, however I don’t believe that there is a way currently to mass automate the appearance change (short of setting up each separate colour manually).

However I am not having any luck with Acrobat Pro’s single fixups!

EDIT:

In Acrobat Pro DC there is an option to change the suffix using a regex pattern:

As the regex search string is longer than the GUI field in the screenshot, the default regular expression pattern is:

^((?i)PANTONE)\s(\d+|[[:alpha:]]+|[[:alpha:]]+\s[[:alpha:]]+|[[:alpha:]]+\s\d+)\s([[:alpha:]]{1,3})$

Despite the default setup using this rather complex regex, the simpler search/replace pattern mentioned above in PitStop Pro also works in Acrobat Pro’s fixup too.

So in theory it should be possible to create a custom preflight profile that uses two custom fixups, one for the rename of C to U and one to normalise colour appearance to the U library… however I can’t work out how to change the order of the custom fixups in the preflight and the normalise always runs first before the rename, when the normalise should run after the rename! Last minute thought, perhaps setting up an Acrobat Pro Action Wizard would allow the steps to be run in the desired order…