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I have a printer which has a black ink connected to the cyan nozzles (black nozzles are blocked). I therefore need to convert a colour PDF file to black and white scale and then convert it to cyan and white scale. I wonder if Adobe Acrobat has such a function to automate this more quickly. Is it possible to do?

Example: convert this CMYK PDF (before) to this CYAN PDF (after)

Michal
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3 Answers3

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Assuming you have Acrobat Pro, there is an Ink Manager which may be able to do this. I have not worked with it, but the Ink Alias function sounds like it might be able to do this:

Create an ink alias for a spot color

You can map a spot color to a different spot or process color by creating an alias. An alias is useful if a document contains two similar spot colors when only one is required, or if it contains too many spot colors. You can see the effects of ink aliasing in the printed output, and you see the effects onscreen if Overprint Preview mode is on.

  1. In the Ink Manager, select the spot color ink you want to create an alias for.
  2. Choose an option in the Ink Alias menu. The ink type icon and ink description change accordingly.

In this case you would first convert the document as a whole to greyscale, then back to colour (which retains the greyscale, but gives you the full colour range to work with). Then you assign black as an alias to cyan.

MiG
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You can convert a PDF to grayscale with these tools:

  1. Use the free PDF-XChange Editor Portable to load the PDF, and Export to TIFF format, setting Image type as 8 (GrayScale). Caveat: the output TIFF file might be 10 times the size of the PDF. It would be nice if it could be exported as a PDF, but I do not see that option on my version of the app.

PDF to grayscale TIFF

2.If you want the TIFF as a PDF, once again, open the file in an image editor such as IrfanView and print as PDF using Microsoft Print PDF.

TIFF to PDF

Though the final PDF is in grayscale, it might be possible to change each page to a specific color. However, it should print looking substantially as black, even missing cyan. Perhaps the printer has a setting to block magenta and yellow, or they can be removed if in separate cartridges.

DrMoishe Pippik
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While not a direct answer to your question, an imaging application that is able to open PDFs can do this. Examples include PhotoShop and Irfanview (free download). However, PhotoShop only opens a single page of the PDF.

In Irfanview, open the PDF. If it is a coloured PDF, go to Image > Convert to Grayscale. Then, go to Image > Color corrections and set both Green and Blue sliders to 255. Save the image as PDF. Press Page Down to go to the next page, and repeat. You can print directly from Irfanview, or, for more printing flexibility, you can open the (now coloured) PDF in your PDF reader, and print from there.

Note: You must use Irfanview 32-bit, as the 64-bit version currently does not support PDF format.

hdhondt
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