How to:

Ensuring Successful PDF Conversion

Issue:

Chameleon CMYK PDF Creator fail to output colours in CMYK as expected.

Solution:

Close all running 'acrodist.exe' processes, re-start Acrobat Distiller and change Color Management Policy to Leave Color Unchanged in the Distiller Job Options.

Step by step instructions:

Follow these steps to ensure you get the expected results from the Chameleon CMYK PDF Creator printer:

• Make sure that Acrobat Distiller is NOT running at all. The best way to do this is by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del, select the job list and investigate all running processes found in the Processes tab. If 'acrodist.exe' appear in the list it must be terminated.
  The 'acrodist.exe' process may appear several times in the list.
• Start the Acrobat Distiller application. 
• Set the Job Options to Press. If you want Chameleon CMYK PDF Creator to produce PDF/X compliant PDF documents you'll need to ensure that the settings are set to follow the PDF 1.3 specification, i.e. is set to be Acrobat 4.0 compatible. The PDF/X standards neither allow PDF versions 1.4 nor 1.5 to be used (Distiller 6.0 has PDF version 1.4 set in it's 'Press Quality' settings).
  Advanced users that really understand how to set the Job Options for Acrobat Distiller can select another setting or any user-defined setting. It is NOT recommended to use user-defined settings unless special requirements need it, however. 
• Close Acrobat Distiller. 
• Start printing your documents to the Chameleon CMYK PDF Creator printer.

Note: Chameleon CMYK PDF Creator will warn you if the Color Management Policy is not set to Leave Color Unchanged in the Distiller Job Options. The warning is implemented as an Acrobat annotation (note type) placed on page 1 in the resulting PDF document, since there is no other way for Chameleon CMYK PDF Creator to trigger a warning message. Therefore, always check your PDF documents in Adobe Acrobat before you send them to commercial printing of any kind.

Reason:

The reason for this is that Chameleon CMYK PDF Creator works in PostScript only and therefore need to set the conversion parameters for Acrobat Distiller via PostScript. Unfortunately there is a discrepancy between the documentation published by Adobe and the way Adobe Acrobat Distiller actually respond to such parameters, which makes it unsafe not to follow the above mentioned approach.

Grafikhuset has reported the here mentioned discrepancy to the Acrobat team at Adobe Systems Inc. Hopefully this discrepancy will be resolved with a future version of Acrobat Distiller, but currently Adobe has chosen to 'fix' it by changing the documentation rather than change the behavior of Acrobat Distiller.