If you're looking for problems in just a single PDF, you can probably just use
Output Preview. But if you're looking for problems in
multiple PDFs and you'd like to batch process them.
Then you need to create a Preflight profile.
To do that, go to your Print Production Tools and choose Preflight.
And you'll see that there's a pretty good number of presets that ship with Acrobat.
But what I'm going to do, is use one of those as a starting point, and then I'm
going to customize it and have it look for anything that's not spot color or black.
In other words, anything that's going to generate a cyan, magenta, or yellow
plate, So under Prepress, I'm going to use this Sheetfed Offset profile as a
starting point. Now, I don't want to change it.
I want to leave it intact. So I'm going to come up to Options and
choose Create New PreFlight Profile. And I need to name it.
And I'm going to tell it to search for CMYK.
So I'm going to name it no CMYK. And you can put all sorts of information
in here if you want to. And here on the left, you can see that
there are a number of kinds of problems you can have it look for.
But in this case, all I'm really worried about is what sort of plates it's going
to generate, and there it is right at the top, and that tells you something, this
is really a common problem. So I wanted to search for anything that's
going to generate (INAUDIBLE) or yellow plates, and I have 4 options here, the
inactive option, well it might find it but it's not going to report on it.
Info, Warning, and Error, well, all three inform me that it's found something.
So really I could use any one of them, but I'm a fan of just using the error,
because when we see that big red X we know we have a problem.
I might check to make sure there's nothing RGB as well, because that would
also generate cyan, magenta, and yellow plates when it goes to a plate setter.
So, I'm going to save this and then I'm going to have it look at this file.
So when I click analyze, well immediately we see that we have a problem.
But think how beneficial this would be if I had to do this to 50 pdf's.
It would report on all of them. I notice there's a problem, but I don't
know exactly where the problem is, so I don't really know what to tell the
original designer to fix. So I need to know what the image is or
multiple images if multiple images are causing the problem.
When I click on this, nothing happens, well this is the secret.
Down here at the lower left it says show in Snap, which makes no sense until you
know there's something called Snap view, and this is it Snap view.
There, now I know what the problem is, it's this image.
So, now I know how to inform the designer, they need to go back, into
Photoshop and fix that image, so that it's really a duotone.
It looks like a duotone, but it isn't one.
So, I can't fix this. There's no way to repair this.
Here in Acrobat but at least now I know what the problem is and so now i can
inform the designer. So if you have multiple PDFs that you
want to check, make sure that they're healthy consider making a Preflight
profile, it sort of does the work for you it's much more efficient.
You can automate the process and it's all about trying to make sure that your files
are healthy before you send them to press.