When saving from publisher to PDF font color changes?

[High Country Furniture]

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?

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

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

[Abambo]

Last month for the first time any red titles and headings were converted to black when copying to a .pdf. Pictures and images reproduce fine. Only red or blue text I have included are black. It can't be the program or the equipment unless there has been a program change that has created this very unsettling result.

By @Karen29665917bma1

How did you create the PDF file? Did you use the “File→Save as PDF”? Not every tool creating a PDF file involves an Adobe tool, as Dov says (https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat-discussions/when-saving-from-publisher-to-pdf-font-color-chan...).

[default6fr21q39j4ou]

One possibility might be fiddling with the printer settings - colour/RGB/CMYK (even when saving as a PDF file).

[Larry302022411m3y]

I just wanted to supplement the original answer which correctly describes the issue. Since I don't have a color printer to use as my default I did another work around. I did a right-click on my text box (headline with red text) in Publisher and chose "Save as Picture" then imported the image to use as my new header. It worked great as the application does not covert colors in images.

[mikem92584752]

SOLVED.  I was experiencing the same issue: true type fonts changing to grey while images retained their colors upon exporting to PDF from Publisher.  I don't have a color printer on my network to change to "default" within Windows as the other solutions suggested.  For me - selecting "Print" within Publisher, then choosing printer: "Microsoft Print to PDF" worked perfectly.  All font colors were retained in the created PDF.

[Abambo]

Microsoft Print to PDF is a virtual printer from Microsoft an as a virtual printer, it prints in colour too. Also here, there were no Adobe tools involved. The problem is publisher and/or Windows and the solutions will be found or need to be found on a Microsoft forum. 

Solutions have been handed out, I will lock this old thread now.