Get this #?$§! CMYK PDF engine fixed!

[Be.eM]

Sorry, just venting…

I just did a small mistake and created a PDF from an 154 page manual with "Convert all CMYK colors to RGB" enabled. I couldn't believe it, the PDF was ready in exactly 6 Minutes! I've created tons of PDFs before, of exactly the same manual in other languages, and each of them took about 45 minutes. RGB = 6 minutes, including a color conversion, and CMYK = 45 minutes, while maintaining the colors? 133% of colors means 750% of processing time? And a screen going completely haywire when saving to CMYK pdf, while looking OK (as usual) when saving to RGB? And still without being able to save spot colors as spot colors?

This, in addition to the fact that the majority of OTF Pro/W1G/COM fonts (including several CJK fonts) still doesn't work in CMYK, makes the PDF engine look more and more like a construction site. In a very, very early state…

Bernd

[Arnis Gubins]

Bernd,

I'll second that! The CMYK SaveAsPDF is in need of a serious overhaul.

Your timings for creating PDFs mirror my own observations, in that printing to the Adobe PDF printer instance, creating a postscript file and then manually distilling can be up to 100x faster than using the SaveAsPDF function. Albeit, this puts me back in the old RGB workflow, but other third-party tools (e.g. PitStopPro, PubliPDF) allow the RGB colours to be properly mapped to CMYK or Spot colours as required with no surprises.