How can I get FM to stop changing my CMYK colours?

[Guest]

I have a FM file that I need to set the text to a specific CMYK colour (90-0-49-0).

I have set this colour in FM, however when I print my PDF file - the CMYK values are changed.

I understand this is because FM runs the file through the Windows printer driver that converts to RGB.

Is there a fix for this issue in the more recent versions of FM?

If not - does anyone know how I can get FM to produce a PDF without changing my CMYK colour values?

I am using FM 7.2.

Thank you.

[Be.eM]

Starting with FrameMaker 10 (latest updates) and later versions, FrameMaker has an alternative "CMYK engine" for PDF output which does actually write correct CMYK values to PDF. As I understand it, this CMYK engine is partially based on very old postscript programming code, so it may have issues which sometimes require the old Windows PS/RGB output as a fallback option. This may be the case when using some open type fonts which are not getting written correctly to PDF (we have that issue e.g. with the Meta Pro font) , and font related "fake" functions like "bolded, obliqued" also fail to make it to PDF with the CMYK option enabled.

Before FM had this option, we always used Acrobat plugins like PitStop to convert to correct CMYK colors. And for images, EPS has always allowed getting correct CMYK output, even through the Windows PS engine, because these files are just pushed through the engine without getting touched by it.

[Stefan-Gentz]

Bernd,

As I understand it, this CMYK engine is partially based on very old postscript programming code

What brings you to this conclusion?!?

*Stefan.

[Be.eM]

Stefan,

I'm not a programmer, so my info may be wrong, but isn't FM still using (in parts) PostScript Level 1 commands and headers, inherited and more or less unchanged from very old versions (back when there was a Mac and Unix version as well)? At least this is what I've understood from the info, development and bug sleuthing during CMYK output development. I somewhat remember that being important regarding the spot color handling or similar… not sure, it has been a long time since then.

Bernd

[Arnis_Gubins]

Also, several former product managers and engineers have said that they used the unix version code to generate the cmyk output, so this perhaps may have created that impression?

Regardless, the FM PDF creation (or rather postscript printing) engines are quite fickle and have substantial eccentricities, that creating press-quality CMYK output is still a crap shoot. Directly publishing to PDF (like InDesign) would at least bring FM's PDF creation into the 21st century.