PMS color issues

[rachells]

When I first began working as the office manager at the Brain Tumor Society, our director of communications told me that we were having issues with getting our logo purple (PMS 272) to print correctly on our in-house inkjet printers. Eventually, we persuaded the executive director that we needed a PMS-compliant color laser printer, and purchased one. We did need to load the printer manufacturer's color profiles into Quark, but our colors worked from Quark thereafter.

Our PMS colors did *not*, however, work from Quark layouts converted to PDF, whether converted in Quark or in Acrobat; they look rather intensely blue. Things end up looking okay when we send PDFs to a professional printing company or even just to Kinko's, but I suspect that they do what another poster to these forums mentioned - open the PDF in Photoshop and tweak things as needed. We did upgrade to the latest and greatest version of Quark, but that did not fix the problem.

This is an issue because our development folks need to be able to print sponsorship materials on the laser printer, and we can't afford to buy Quark for the whole office (that whole nonprofit thing; 95% of our income goes to brain tumor research & support).

Many thanks for any suggestions!

[PrintDriver]

If you are printing your pdfs from Acrobat you will probably have to load the printer profile there too. Or to whatever you are printing your pdfs from.

[rachells]

So, even for people who only have Acrobat Reader?

[PrintDriver]

Hmmm, I can access my Panasonic laser printer's profiles from Reader when printing using the Print Dialogue box under the tipdown arrow for 'Printer Features'. You may have a Quality tipdown in there that lets you select color profiles as needed.
<I'm using a Mac. Don't know about PC>
Profiles aren't always a program thing. They can be a printer driver thing too.

I may be way off base with this.

[doubting_thomas]

rachells,
How are you making the PDF's? Are you Exporting from Quark, or are you printing
to file then Distilling? I ask because there are a few places along the way that
can convert colors using a profile. After rereading your original post it sounds
lke the problem is occuring before the files leave your office, but it's tough
to tell. Quark could be converting it to CMYK when printed, or Acrobat Distiller
could have a profile selected in the settings you're using. It may in fact be easier
to convert the logo to a visually pleasing 4 color tif that could be swapped
out if you need to send out for spot color work to be done. Any time you
convert spot colors to CMYK you should expect some color shift, unless the
spots are C, M, Y or K. You may want to check you output workflow to make
sure the correct, or no, profiles are being used for the conversion.
I may be missing something though.

[urstwile]

Are the other people in the office all using the same printer driver setup that you are? I agree with PD, this sounds like a printer driver thing, as opposed to a conversion thing or even a program thing.

[panzer]

its all to do with the calibration isnt it ??? whenever we make a pdf on Quark and say we opened the pdf on a pc well you aint gonna get the same colour are you (we dont
)no way no how

unless summat like PD and chaps above