Grayscale printing problem on DocuColor 252

[Joe Arseneau]

If you have any relationship with the content creator, have them design all jobs to be printed with the PDF/x standard preset and these issues will no longer occur.

The issue is caused usually by designing the file and saving it as PDF instead of PDF/X, PDF is meant to be read, not printed so the file has transparent overlays which printers do not understand. Adobe created the PDF/x standard for printing due to issues caused in print by Fonts/Layers and Transparencies.

For cases where you do not control content creation the “Print as image” option is there under File>Print>Advanced , it flattens the PDF and sends what is essentially a Bitmap image of the pdf to print so the transparencies and layers are gone and fonts that are not properly embedded are rendered as an image so there can be no interpretation failures.

The Composite Overprint option can usually solve transparency and layer issues, but not in 100% of all cases, and it will do nothing for unknown or improperly embedded fonts. In this case that option was not available as it only applies in CMYK

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/acrobat/X/pro/using/WSd7ad1123a4c5dffe-5183c8012b97790144-8000.html

http://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/quick-fix-print-pdf-image.html

[theupsstore4911]

Apparently there's some sort of problem with that one layer that won't render correctly in the Fiery's PostScript implementation. No idea if the problem lies with the creator's software or ours. Luckily, Print As Image worked. Thank you!

[Joe Arseneau · Accepted solution]

First , verify that Acrobat/Reader is not changing things by selecting Advanced and have it match this

Also make sure greyscale is selected in the Driver not in Acrobat/Reader, all these things can be skipped if the job is being imported into CWS instead of using File > Print

If all else fails there is always "Print as image" in Acrobat/Reader (as seen in the screenshot above) if you check that the problem you are seeing can't happen as the layer that is causing the issue will be flattened pre-RIP

[theupsstore4911]

Attempting to print from a customer-supplied .pdf. A visibly dark/black portion of image is faded or missing when printing in grayscale, although it shows up when printed in CMYK. Top left is how the image prints in grayscale, bottom left is how it prints in CMYK, and right is how it prints on a Ricoh in grayscale. Any ideas?