Colors distored when printing PDF

Check your PDF Conversion Settings, the Standard settings apply an sRGB color profile, which will change your original PowerPoint colors (although this typically does't change gray to yellow), but it's worth a shot. Change your settings to High Quality Print, which will leave color unchanged.

In terms of pure gray (R=G=B), the RGB profile shouldn't make a bit of difference.

What prints depends very much on the type of printer you are printing to.

For PostScript devices, unless you've mucked with the advanced color settings, Acrobat Color Management is used and all R=G=B content prints using black-only colorant by default.

For non-PostScript devices, the RGB goes out pretty much as is and it is either the printer driver or the device that might intercept R=G=B and force grayscale.

However, once you go beyond R=G=B and the values of R, G, and B differ by any amount, you could get color casts both with PostScript and non-PostScript devices. You can check the RGB values using the Acrobat 10 Output Preview - Object Inspector.

Give us some more particulars about (1) how you actually convert PowerPoint to PDF as well as what version of Office you have and (2) what type of printer (make, model, and page description language) you are printing to and we might be able to narrow down your problem further.

I have office 2010. The printer is a Xerox Phaser 6280. I use the Adobe Addin to convert to PDFs from within power point. One reason I think that it might be Acrobat is that my colleague who uses Acrobat 9 does not have the color distortion issue when he prints PDFs but everyone who uses Acrobat 10 has the color distortion issue. Also, the issue arises when printing pdfs that were created before I upgraded my acrobat to acrobat 10.

Can you check the print dialog settings in Acrobat 10:

1. File > Print
2. Click Advanced
3. Select Color Management on the left
4. In Color Handling on the right, try Same as Source (No Color Management)