Printing 1 page with color, the rest as grayscale

[Ed_Eubanks]

I have a document in which the first page needs to be printed in full color, and the rest I would like to print in B&W/grayscale.

The document is a church bulletin/order of worship, and the church's logo is in color on the front. The rest of the document (booklet format, and 12 pages total) is all in black text/graphics.

It is printed to an HP color laser printer, and a large number of copies each week. I've noticed that the color toner cartridges are depleting a lot faster than I would have expected, and in examination I saw that it was printing each page in "color" (even though the text itself is rendered as registration black in ID) which I assume means it is achieving the black through a composite of all 4 toners, rather than just the black one.

The printer is an HP Color LaserJet MFP M477fdw. One option that occurs to me is to set InDesign's color management in the printer profile to let the PostScript printer set the colors. Does anyone know if that option will achieve what I want to do?

If not, is there a way to set a single page to output in color, and the rest of the pages to output in grayscale/B&W?

(My fallback option is to print out the first booklet page in color—which would handle the cover's logo—and the rest in grayscale; but this is less than ideal, both because of the tedium of printing the document in stages and because it still doesn't prevent the other 3 panels of the booklet from using color toner.)

Thanks in advance for the help.

[Migintosh]

Ed_Eubanks  wrote

…even though the text itself is rendered as registration black in ID…

Registration color is C=100, M=100, Y=100 & K=100. You should use regular black.

[Ed_Eubanks]

Excellent point, thank you. I just re-checked; actually all of the text IS regular black.

[rob day]

(My fallback option is to print out the first booklet page in color—which would handle the cover's logo—and the rest in grayscale; but this is less than ideal, both because of the tedium of printing the document in stages and because it still doesn't prevent the other 3 panels of the booklet from using color toner.)

I‘m guessing your only option is to choose Composite Gray in the Output tab of the Print dialog, and then print color pages separately.

InDesign doesn‘t have a Grayscale space. The default [Black] swatch is a CMYK color swatch (0|0|0|100). Almost all composite printers use RGB drivers, which convert CMYK color into the printer’s color space—black only converts to a 4 color mix.

[Guest]

Was this solved? I've got the same issue.

[Laubender]

Hi Marleen,

stay with Ed's workaround.

Print in two chunks.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

[Guest]

Hi Uwe,

Unfortunately that's no option for me. Just like Ed I need to print booklets that have a color cover, my printer staples them for me so I can't ad the cover manually.

[Laubender]

Sorry, I see no solution then.

Hm. What one can try:

Export two PDFs, one with color and one with grayscale and combine them with Acrobat Pro.

Then print booklet from Acrobat Pro. But I cannot tell if your printer will honor the change from color to grayscale.

But perhaps worth a try.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

[Guest]

Yeah already tried that, but my Ricoh printer is really not cooperating. Too bad.