We are running into an issue with PDF corruption after converting individual color newspaper ads to grayscale and PDFing the final newspaper page in InDesign. (The ads in question were also exported to PDF directly from the latest version of InDesign CC.)
If we convert the CMYK color ad PDFs to grayscale in Acrobat (Print Production > Convert Colors > Conversion Profile: Dot Gain 30%), place them on the newspaper layout and generate the final news page PDF in InDesign using "Press Quality" (Acrobat 5/PDF 1.4), the resulting PDF is corrupt and states "An error exists on this page. Acrobat may not display the page correctly," usually with Acrobat DC unexpectedly quitting.
However, if we instead use Acrobat's preflight method of converting the ads to grayscale (Preflight > Convert to Grayscale) before placing them on the page, the final InDesign PDF is fine.
In addition, I have found that if I convert either the buggy converted grayscale ad to PDF/X before placing on the page, or expert the final newspaper page as PDF/X, the issue goes away, but I am worried about transparencies, etc. getting screwed up/dropping off because of the older standard. (PDF 1.3 vs. 1.4.)
Obviously, we'll be using the Preflight method from now on to convert ads to grayscale, but it definitely seems like there is a major bug that we've stumbled upon. Is there anyone else that has experienced this? And any thoughts on whether we should be using PDF/X (1.3) vs "Press Quality" (1.4) as a workflow would be appreciated.
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