No Composite CMYK color option in InDesign for printing

Most of the statements in the post you are replying to are not true.

The answer that is marked correct is actually correct. The original post is from a person who was printing to a desktop inkjet printer (not a printing press), which uses software that expects RGB data to come in, not CMYK. Therefore InDesign is setting up the job as the printer driver allows. It would be wrong to send that printer CMYK, because the printer uses more than 4 inks and therefore sending it CMYK would not take full advantage of the printer. Sending it RGB data provides for a larger original color gamut, which is then converted to the larger gamut that the inkjet printer’s 8 or 9 inks can reproduce.

Now, you might actually be working on a job that is only intended to go to a CMYK press in the end, and therefore it is best to specify all the colors in CMYK. Maybe you want to do a “hard proof” on a desktop inkjet printer to check the colors. That is possible to some extent with the printer’s own driver software, but to do things like preview halftoned CMYK separations (which most people shouldn’t actually have to do), you should have the printer emulate the final platemaker as closely as possible. But to do that, you need extra printer emulation software. That is what Rob Day was talking about when he mentioned a “third-party RIP” (raster image processor). If you set up one of those, or if you are actually hooked up to a CMYK output device, then InDesign will present CMYK options in the Print dialog box. InDesign is only doing what is correct for the way the printing pipeline is set up.

They said they didn’t have to convert to CMYK before. That might be because in the old PageMaker days, all jobs were CMYK, because all jobs went to press. But that is no longer true, the world has changed since then. Now jobs need to go to web, to video and TV, to apps, and maybe to press, and old CMYK is not good enough for all that. Around the time high quality desktop color inkjet printers became available about 20 years ago, RGB-based workflows started becoming important, and now RGB is dominant, even in prepress, partly because RGB workflows work much better for multiple media and for reprinting jobs on different presses.

The last statement in the post you replied to is also wrong. I don’t think any PageMaker code exists in InDesign today (and yes, I have used both applications in their prime). In fact, the reason InDesign was created was to start over so that we would no longer have to be held back by the critical technical problems PageMaker had.

The CcMmYKk inkset your Canon printer uses has a considerably larger color gamut than standard offset press inks, so to take advantage of that larger gamut the driver expects composite RGB and the driver makes the final conversion into the printer's profile. Usually RGB drivers do better if you send RGB images and colors.

The iProof RIP I'm showing in my capture can output actual document CMYK values, but typical offset profiles like the default US SWOP Coated don't work in that case because the profile of the printer doesn't resemble offset at all.