Black and white file exporting with color

[Jaymie74855]

I have a file that uses absolutely no color in InDesign.  It's all black and white.  After exporting it to PDF and oepning it in acrobat the black and white stars are now yellow.  When exporting the no color conversion is checked.  I've been printing this file for 5 + years now and never had an issue until today with the stars converting to yellow.  I haven't changed anything in the settings in either program.  Anyone have an idea what happened or what I can do to fix this?

[Luke Jennings3]

Check your Acrobat Accessibility preferences, "Replace document colors" should be off. How does the pdf look in Reader? Can you attach a sample pdf to this post?

[Jaymie74855]

Replace document colors is off.  I attached a few pages of the file.  All of the yellow stars are supposed to be white with black outline.  It is a font and I choose white as the fill and black as the outline.

[rob day]

Hi @Jaymie74855 , Does it happen if you Export to a Gray profile destination? Something like this:

[Luke Jennings3]

The yellow color is a "Device" color, according to the Acrobat Output preview tool. I think your font may be to blame. Make a new white swatch (o,o,o,o) and use that for the fill, if it still doesn't work, make separate file for the stars, convert to outlines, and place that as a pdf.

[Jaymie74855 · Accepted solution]

The only thing that has seemed to work is making a separate file with just the stars and converting it & placing it.  I don't know what changed after 5 years of using this file but at least there was some kind of work around! 

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Can you share your file for investigation? 

[rob day]

The only thing that has seemed to work is making a separate file with just the stars and converting it & placing it.

You could also replace the star Type 2 font with an Open Type font (not OpenType SVG). It’s the Type 3 font that’s adding the color. Adobe Type has a number of Open Type ornament fonts, e.g. Adobe Pi, with star glyphs

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

You mention "5+ years" - have you been doing Save As with a new name from time to time - or only Save? Maybe your file got corrupted? 

Have you upgraded recently to CC 2024 / 19.x?

Are you on a PC or Mac? If Mac - Sonoma? 

[rob day]

As Luke suggests the dingbat font is Type 3, which can contain color. Have you always used the T3Font_2 font for the stars?

[Jaymie74855]

Yes I have.  Nothing has changed on my end.  I usually just open the PDF file and print this time the yellow stars appeared instead of the black and white ones.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

Do you have an older PDF that did work as you expected so we can take a look at? It might help give us a clue what's happening.

Also: what exactly is the font you are using for the stars?

Does it change anything if you convert that text to outlines?

[rob day]

Hi Brad the font in the provided PDF is T3Font_2 and the font type is listed as Type 3. It would be surprising if a Type 3 font acted differently in the past. Here I have stars set in Open Type (SVG) which (would produce the same problem as a Type 3 font with colored glyphs), and a regular OTF font.

All the text filled with None and stroked with black:

PDF No Color Conversion:

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

"Hi Brad the font in the provided PDF is T3Font_2"  

That I know. I was curious what the NAME of the font is (and where it was sourced). It could be a recent ID update has changed a PDF export algorithm rgarding these type of color fonts (Type 3 or SVG). We had a big discussion a not that long ago on how these fonts might change color depending on the PDF export settings.

I would like to see sample INDD file with the font to see if it's a version issue between CC2024 and anything older.

(Note: missing Name and Postscript Name) . I also found it weird that it subset a duplicate of the same glyph every time it was used. Normally a subset font would need only 1 glyph