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High Country Furniture
Participant
June 23, 2016
Answered

When saving from publisher to PDF font color changes?

  • June 23, 2016
  • 12 replies
  • 58775 views

When creating a document on publisher and converting that doc to a pdf, the font color changes to gray, no matter what color font I use. I just got off the phone with publisher and they concluded that it's an issue with adobe. Anyone else have this problem?

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    Correct answer High Country Furniture

    I actually figured it out, (after quite some effort!). The issue was that the default printer on the computer was a b&w printer, making the text turn an odd gray, no matter what color I made the text.

    I knew that the printer had to be a color printer, HOWEVER; I did not know that merely having the document itself set up to print on a color printer is not enough. Any and all printers that have been selected as default have to be color printers.

    12 replies

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    J
    jasone11748375
    Participant
    November 9, 2018

    Thank you! I can't believe that my default being my laser printer (B&W) caused this. Lame!  But, thank you for the fix!

    Dov Isaacs
    Dov Isaacs
    Legend
    June 23, 2016

    By “publisher” do you mean Microsoft Publisher?

    Assuming that you mean Microsoft Publisher, how are you creating the PDF file?

    If you are creating the PDF file by doing “save as PDF” from Microsoft Publisher's Save As menu item and selecting PDF as the file type, you are not using any Adobe product to produce the PDF file and as such Adobe can't do anything to help you. In my own test however, saving a document from Microsoft Publisher to PDF kept the document's red text red, i.e., no conversion to grayscale.

    Alternatively, if you have Adobe Acrobat and are printing to the Adobe PDF PostScript printer driver instance to create PDF, one of the settings in the Microsoft Publisher print dialog is your choice of Composite RGB or Composite Grayscale. Composite grayscale will cause exactly what you are seeing. Change the setting and the gray problem goes away. Unfortunately, the print subsystem of the newer versions of Microsoft Publisher only support Composite RGB or Composite Grayscale. There is no way to pass through CMYK colors.

    Generally speaking, Microsoft Publisher is not a serious document layout program, missing many features required for professional publication usage.

              - Dov

    - Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
    H
    High Country FurnitureAuthorCorrect answer
    Participant
    June 24, 2016

    I actually figured it out, (after quite some effort!). The issue was that the default printer on the computer was a b&w printer, making the text turn an odd gray, no matter what color I made the text.

    I knew that the printer had to be a color printer, HOWEVER; I did not know that merely having the document itself set up to print on a color printer is not enough. Any and all printers that have been selected as default have to be color printers.

      Dov Isaacs
      Dov Isaacs
      Legend
      June 24, 2016

      That really sounds like a bug in Microsoft Publisher that you should report to them.

                - Dov

      - Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
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