Converting PDF text to black before exporting monochrome Tiffs

Have you tried printing back to the PDF Printer. There is a checkbox in the print dialog (Windows only) to Print Color as black. See this video:
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/acrobat-tips-and-tricks/optimizing-your-pdf-document/

There are many other methods to accomplish this. Specifically you can use the Print Production tools and Convert Colors, with a Grayscale profile. Using a profile with a higher dot gain (20 % or higher) can make those Oranges turn into darker grays.

You can also use the touch-up text and touch-up object tools to change the text color before conversion.

For more on the print production tools, advance to 7 minutes in this video:
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-acrobat-9/getting-started-06-creative-workflow/

Hi Kelly

Thanks for the input. I will look investigate these ideas further.

I have been able to convert colored text to gray in Convert Colors, but from what I could tell it didn't seem to produce a gray significantly different from the gray I get when I export the PDF as monochrome Tiffs.

Also, I don't want the colors in charts and graphs to be converted to black; I'm trying to preserve as much of the nuance of those as possible, as these are statistical publications. A pie chart where every slice is black won't help anyone who might view these documents.

Basically, if there is a way to specifically target the text, make it black, and be able to save the PDF that way, I would be very much in favor of it! To individually touch up all the colored text sections in a 100+ page document would be very time consuming, which I'm trying to avoid.

So far I've come up with a workaround of saving the PDF as a Word document, selecting all the text in the document at once, and changing the text fill color to black. I then have to re-save as a PDF ...

Hi,

mmhhh…
We are in the 21th century now, what about PDF/A ?

;-)

Ah, yes. Well, if the electric grid crashes, presumably one could still view on microfiche, say, a document about India's inflation rate in 2010. Why they would want to is another question!

Actually, this doesn't always produce ideal results, depending on the font used in the PDF. Exporting a PDF as Word doc in these cases creates some strange randomized capitalization and fonts. So, not really a workable solution in general.

Ian,
Just a natter; but, if the grid goes the use of a microfiche viewer would be problematic, eh?

Back to PDF/A - It and PDF are ISO Standards and prep of information published to PDF/A is well established.
It is used by most National Archive organizations.
Creation of PDF with embedded fonts and other PDF/A requirements is, typically, a process of greater long term efficacy than back-fitting content in PDF so that it can be dropped into microfiche.

Organizations with a need to provide long term archiving of digital content can look over the
PDF Association's PDF/A Competency Center - http://www.pdfa.org/

Hi,

not really an answer, just guess:

Acrobat 9+ preflight lets place texts on a separate layer, then it should be easier to convert them to black leaving other objects untouched…

:-)

Thank you for the input.

daka--Unfortunately, those decisions are beyond my pay grade. I'm just a monkey trained to put PDFs on microfiche, which some customers apparently still demand. And as for the grid going down, I'm sure there are ways to magnify images without electricity--whether that's where the thinking lies, I'm not sure.

Merlin--Thank you for the idea. I have tried that, and it did seem promising, but the problem of "selecting all" text remains. Once I separate the layers, I'm not sure how to (or if I can) apply a process to that entire layer.

Ian

It's very difficult to do a wildcard text color change in Preflight, as the fixup selectors required are not directly-available (you can for example change a *specific* color to another color, but cannot change all colors at once).

If you don't mind the graphics being affected, printing to PDF using the B+W option is your best bet (normally we would advise against refrying a PDF but as you're only going to output these files to fiche, losing layers and interactivity isn't an issue). The second option would be to use a commercial plugin, such as Quite A Box Of Tricks, which can run a "make all text K-black" action without affecting other content in the document. You could of course write your own plugin using the SDK (wouldn't be too hard if you know C++, and wouldn't cost anything).

Thanks, UVSAR! I will look into the idea of the plug-ins, and see if I can convince someone to put it on IT's agenda.