Beginner Question: Illustrator PMS printing (no colour)

[EspressoPlease]

Hi!



Painful question for all the graphic guru’s out there I am sure, but I am just a beginner at printing. I am using Illustrator CS (PC), and I need to set up some text that is printing on a red PMS background to be white. The paper is white, so the text needs to be set up as no colour for my printer. He is unable to instruct me how to do this in Illustrator (he’s a Corel man), so I was wondering if someone could give me a hand – I have been surfing for the last two hours at no avail!



Please note, I have no experience in printing what so ever (I have just learnt what PMS colours are!)… So if you do respond, please keep it simple for stupid!

[D-Frag]

Just make your type white, the printer will take care of the rest. Welcome to the GDF

[EspressoPlease]

I originally did that (in CMYK) and then he phoned and asked me to change it to Spot colours. I then did that, but couldn’t do white (so did a PMS Grey instead). He then phoned back to say that if I wanted it in white (not to print at all), I would need to do something within Illustrator to allow this. He wasn’t sure what, as he doesn’t use the program but said in other programs it would be “None, Paper, Knock Out or some kind of complete lack of colour.” Any idea what he means?

[Patrick Shannon]

Simply make that type the same as your background spot color, then change it to 0% in your swatch palette. It will make it white and "knock" out the area below it. But in reality, it's all the same color if that makes sense, just the type is absence of color.

[Image]

I've never heard of that before. I always just set up the text as white. There is one way to do what he is asking, even though it is kind of a pain in the ass.

See if you can follow me.
Assuming you have a red background that your type sits on top of.

open the pathfinder window (window>pathfinder).

Select your type. Right click, create outlines. With your type selected, hit the "i" key and click the red background, setting your outlined font to have the same fill and stroke as the background. Now hold shift and click the background, selecting both the type and the background. go to the pathfinder window, and hit the button of the top four that looks like and empty box in front of a filled box (second from the left), then click the "expand" button.

Now you have a compound path that is your background with the shape of the text knocked out.

[Image]

Simply make that type the same as your background spot color, then change it to 0% in your swatch palette. It will make it white and "knock" out the area below it. But in reality, it's all the same color if that makes sense, just the type is absence of color.

I could be wrong, but I thing that's not actually a "printing knockout" because when you plate the job, the red background will still plate everything under that 0% spot text. If you knockout using pathfinder, it catually creates a new shape that is a background missing information in the shape of your text.

That's what most printers (or at least ones here) do for you when you send them a file with either white text or 0% spot text on top of a background.

Which I guess means I have seen it before. I guess I just had to think about it for a minute.

[EspressoPlease]

Aaaaa, you guys are awesome! Thanks heaps!:D

[Patrick Shannon]

Image:

Like I explained, it's not so much a knockout but it achieves the same effect. Don't forget that even if the text is 0%, it's still a red pantone. It's not white and red, but 0% and 100% red. It's the same color, but different densities, that's the trick to it. This is how you achieve your screens and such. So if I had a gradient and assigned 10% on one end and 100% on the other, it would fade into one another, naturally. Likewise, making the text the same color (with a 0%) as the background is an absence of color, when you print seperations it sees it all as one, yet it prints nothing for the 0% area.

It will not print the area below it as a solid.....unless you told it to by using your overprint/knockout/etc options. Let's say I was printing a faint/light blue background with black text on top of it. Normally, that black text would indeed knock out the area below it, but I don't want to give the printer any more alignment headaches than I need to. So I could either add a little trap to that text, or simply overprint it and make the entire background solid, and the black dominates that faint blue.

You can indeed do the same thing with the pathfinder and cut out the text, that would work just as well. But don't forget that if you need to make an alteration to that text, you'd have to redo the background.