Exporting from InDesign gives an error exists on this page

[KenWK]

We have a project in which pages of from other parts of the project get placed in InDesign as artwork. For one of the books, things that are normally full color are black and white.

We're exporting PDFs from InDesign setting "Color convertion" to "Convert to Destination" and setting the destingation to one of the grayscales.

When we place those black and white PDFs in another InDesign file and export, Acrobat is giving the "An error exists on this page..." message. Opening the black and white PDF (the one that gets placed) is OK, and placing full color PDFs is OK, so it seems to have somethingn to do with the black and white PDF being placed that's causing the error.

Saving IDML and re-opening has not helped and I've made sure there are no hidden objects, which were really the only two suggestions I found online.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Ken

[Randy Hagan]

Hi Ken.

How are the "pages from other parts of the project" generated? Are they Illustrator/AutoCAD files? Charts from Excel? Scanned-in pixel files?

Are you getting any errors from your InDesign preflighting while creating the books? Any Links and Images errors if you use the File>Package... menu command?

Knowing how those suspect pages are created before they are placed into InDesign will determine how we can help you get past your problems.

Randy

[KenWK]

Thanks for replying, Randy.

The pages from other parts of the project are single page PDFs exported from InDesign that have no printers marks, bleeds or layers in them. As I mentioned, only the black and white ones are giving us trouble, the color ones are working OK. I'm an getting no errors from InDesign preflight.

One thing we've discovered since: If we export a color PDF from InDesign and use Acrobat to convert it to gray scale, everything is fine with the grayscale ones also. I did notice that the Acrobat convert to grayscale preflight profile also includes "Convert registration color to CMYK black only" in addition to the "Convert color to grayscale" commane. Though given that there are no printer marks or "registration" color, I'm not sure that means anything.

Thanks again

[Randy Hagan · Accepted solution]

My suspicion is that either your original documents created for something different than a Print intent, or someone has used an RGB color build into the document. Those are the most likely reasons why you are finding issues with color conversion to CMYK/grayscale output from InDesign. It may be a created InDesign color build (which you can tell from your Color panel and/or Print>Output>Separations options, or you may have a placed RGB color space graphic placed into it, which you can check File>Package... menu command in the Links and Images section.

It may be possible that someone used the [Registration] color option for an InDesign element, as it looks just like [Black] in your document but functions much differently, and that would be harder to sleuth, but that can be found by checking for such element(s) in the Preflight Panel settings. But it's a less likely possibility.

You've found a way around your problem, but this doesn't fix the offending issue. Depending on how many times you'll be back to this well, it may or may not be worth it to you to find the cause of the problem instead of work your way around to find a solution.

Glad it's worked out for you,

Randy

[KenWK]

These files were initially created by someone else and are very messy. Frankly, any of the things you listed are definate possiblities. I'll try to find time to check on the RGB and Registration things and post back if I find anything.

Thank you