Manipulating a PDF and Getting it Ready for Print

If you are familiar with Adobe Acrobat (many of us in the printing industry use this on a daily basis), then you'll be interested in these 4 useful tips for working with PDF Documents.

Tool #1: Using Output Preview

By using output preview you can easily see where CMYK lands throughout your project. By using this, you will be able to catch 4-color black, meaning black text or an object that has all four colors with in it.

Access Output Preview by going to the Advanced Tab and finding "Output Preview".
Windows Users: this is located in Advanced > Print Production > Output Preview.

The Output Preview allows you to proof various aspects of the PDF document. Check against simulated profiles, including various dot gain percentages (GREAT for newspaper/newsprint printing!). This is also a great way to check that all elements of your production are in the same color mode (eg. CMYK, RGB, Lab, etc.), and to ensure images are being read as images, spot colors are being read as spot colors, and so on. You can also use Output Preview to simulate your color separations (we talked about those in this post).

Tool #2: Using TouchUp Object Tool

The TouchUp Object tool is a great way to fix mispelled words, adjust photos, or simply change a date on a publication. Access the TouchUp Object tool by going to the Tools Tab and clicking Advanced Editing (Tools > Advanced Editing > TouchUp Object Tool).

Here we see an object that is 4-color black and has been selected by the touch up object tool. Once selected, right click and go to "Edit Image", which will bring you into Photoshop; where you can perform further manipulations of the image (eg. convert to grayscale, correct color ballances, adjust flaws, etc.). We'll talk about how to do all that to this object in future posts.

Tool #3: Using the Preflight Tool

Using the preflight tool will help customers find out if they have 4-Color black or if the fonts are embedded. It also allows you to prepare the document for printing to various media (eg. magazine, newspaper, web/sheetfed offset, etc.) This however, is only the tip of the iceberg for what the Preflight Tool can do for you (we'll talk in-depth about the Preflight Tool later). To access the Preflight screen, go under the Advanced tab and click on Preflight.

This is the Preflight Tool dialog box, showing all the options and scenarios that are available to choose from.

Tool #4: Using the Object Tool

The object tool can be used in many different ways such as selecting text to make it 100% black, selecting an object and moving it, or turning that object to grayscale or CMYK.

Furthermore, you can us plugins like Enfocus Inspector (part of Enfocus PitStop Professional) to really power up your PDF editing abilities.