This is about what happens when I create, save or export to PDF format, not about something within Illustrator. I don't think it's helpful to have been moved to the Illustrator forum.

Monika, my global color settings are set to North America General Purpose 2. The document setting is set to CMYK although I realized there wasn't a specific profile assigned to the individual document. In the save as PDF dialog, if I choose the High Quality print PDF setting, the color conversion is set to "No conversion", so I thought that would preserve my current color numbers. If I choose a setting like Press Quality, the conversion setting is "Convert to Destination" where the destination is Working CMYK - U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2. Since the destination is the same as the global color  profile I thought that would maintain the current settings. I will try setting the individual document profile to "Working CMYK..." and/or PDF/x-1a as Mordy suggests and see if either helps.

emil emil:

When I go into the Output Preview dialog within Acrobat (for the Illustrator Default generated PDF) it shows me the separations but the coverage % for each one is listed as 'zero' so I'm not getting color breakdowns. I would have thought that it would say 100% next to black. However, when I turn off each one of the separations, it's clear that the black plate is the only one with any text on it. I've looked in this dialog box before during this troubleshooting process, but have always gotten the 'zero' percent readings, which is why I've been a bit confused (truthfully, I'm not very familiar with the pre-press functions within Acrobat). Therefore I've been relying on my print provider's word for it that the file is incorrect. However, I did also take the file into Photoshop as a CMYK PDF, and it is indeed 100% black.

Just a note: I had to submit this file last week, and the workaround I ended up having to go with was to use the type touch up tool in Acrobat to set the color to black. Apparently that solved the problem for the print provider. I really don't know if there was anything wrong with the file, but that adjustment seemed to help.