Substitute spot colors in Acrobat Pro?

[White Haus]

We print a lot of customer-supplied files that contain spot white fills. We mostly use Spot1 (Onyx) but occasionally we use RDG_WHITE (Versaworks/Roland).

There are times where the supplied files are set up with the wrong spot color. Depending on workload or lead time for the project, we will sometimes fix the file (in illustrator or corel, or replace colors in onyx) or send it back to the customer, but either way it results in a delay or extra pre-press work.

Is there a way to replace a spot color within Acrobat Pro? I've found a few areas within the Print Production tab that identifies the spot colors and separations, but have yet to come across the option to replace it. I'm also curious if there is a way to simply rename the spot color and if that would work.

For example, we would need to replace RDG_WHITE with Spot1 or vice-versa.

Thanks.

 

[shoresigns]

Yes, you can do this in Acrobat with a Preflight Fixup. Here's an example of one of Acrobat's built-in fixups that renames Pantone spot colours, similar to what you're trying to do. You might need some knowledge of regular expressions.

 

[shoresigns]

Also, anyone who takes artwork files from clients and sets them up for printing should learn as much as they can about Acrobat's Preflight Checks and Preflight Fixups. You'll be amazed how much time and reprinting costs you can save by automatically checking client files for all the common errors you encounter.

 

[White Haus]

Yes, you can do this in Acrobat with a Preflight Fixup. Here's an example of one of Acrobat's built-in fixups that renames Pantone spot colours, similar to what you're trying to do. You might need some knowledge of regular expressions.

Thank you for this!! I will try this out and see if I can wrap my head around the terminology.

Anywhere I can read up on the Preflight Checks / Preflight Fixups to learn how to better use them?

Never ceases to amaze me how powerful Acrobat Pro is.

 

[shoresigns]

Thank you for this!! I will try this out and see if I can wrap my head around the terminology.

Anywhere I can read up on the Preflight Checks / Preflight Fixups to learn how to better use them?

Never ceases to amaze me how powerful Acrobat Pro is.

I taught myself by simply playing around with it – the Preflight tools look more intimidating than they really are. There are a ton of built-in Checks and Fixups that you can duplicate and edit to learn how they work.

 

[White Haus]

I taught myself by simply playing around with it – the Preflight tools look more intimidating than they really are. There are a ton of built-in Checks and Fixups that you can duplicate and edit to learn how they work.

I got it to work!!!! I can't believe it. At first I stumbled through it but it actually works.

Now I wonder if I can take it one step further for when we're stuck using the damn "special plates" in Rasterlink.

Think I can get it to detect any percentage of RDG_WHITE, covert that to a percentage of Yellow only, then export the layers as 2 separate files?

 

[shoresigns]

Think I can get it to detect any percentage of RDG_WHITE, covert that to a percentage of Yellow only, then export the layers as 2 separate files?

Not sure, but you could probably work out a way to do it in two separate fixups that you run one after the other.

Also, not related, but try making a Droplet, which essentially generates an executable file that you can drop PDF files onto in Windows Explorer to automatically process them in Acrobat.