Please help me understand the Simulate Overprint feature of Acrobat Pro 8. (I have tried Acrobat 8 Help and searching the forums, with no result.)
I am making a PDF from InDesign CS3 for printing on a digital printer. This is a document being repurposed from a press job that used CMYK plus 3 Pantone colors. The job printed fine on an offset press; no complaints from the printer. I am leaving it with the spot inks and letting the digital printer output CMYK. It prints fine on our in-house Xerox DocuColor laser.
The document contains a PSD graphic on a transparent layer and the background turned off, placed in InDesign. It sits on an InDesign background box filled with a spot color.
When I make a PDFX1-a file (transparency flattened), the PSD knocks out the background when viewed in Acrobat with Overprint Preview turned off. When OP is turned on, it displays correctly. The remote digital printer is telling me it prints on his machine with the white knockout, not the graphic showing.
When I send him a Press-Ready PDF exported from InDesign (live transparency), it displays correctly but still prints with the white knockout instead of the graphic.
When I modify the InDesign PDFX1-a preset to turn on Simulate Overprint in the Output panel, the resulting PDF prints the graphic correctly. What I don’t understand is that doing this converts all the Pantones to process, and turns the black type to four-color type. Since this is a digital output job, the all-spots-to-process doesn’t matter, but I don’t want 4-color black type.
In making the PDFs, I have tried the following Output combinations:
Color Conversion: Convert to Destination – both plain and Preserve Numbers options
Destination: US Web Coated SWOP v2
Profile Inclusion: both including and not including profiles
Clearly, I don’t understand the Overprint settings in Acrobat. The only file that works with the graphic ruins the type. What can I do?