Is there a limit in InDesign for exporting spot colors as PDF?

[christophj79940440]

I want to export a PDF file from InDesign. It has about 40 Spot colors because it is a guideline.

While exporting the PDF in InDesign of the whole document I get no problem report, but when I open the exported PDF file in Acrobat some of the spot colors are converted in CMYK. Is there any way to export the PDF with all the spot colors or do I have to export it page by page?

[Bill Silbert]

In the Output section of the Export Adobe PDF dialog window did you have "No Color Conversion" chosen?

[christophj79940440]

Yes sure. No color conversion and no conversion in the ink manager. The colors are all the original from the Pantone color palette in LAB.

[rob day]

The max number of spot plate separations for printing and exporting is 27:

But it doesn't sound like you are actually trying to output 40 separate plates and are printing your guide to a composite printer? If that's the case you can select all 40 swatches in the Swatches panel, double-click and set the Color Type to Process. The document exported to PDF/X-4 default (No Convesion) will export the guide‘s colors as the original Pantone Lab values and the conversion to the printer's destination space can happen when the PDF is printed.

[christophj79940440]

Thank you very much

[christophj79940440]

I have the problem, that the guideline has to be checked be delivering parties and they want to check the colors used in the guideline via acrobat so I think I have to split the guideline for "checking" and limit every export to max 27 spot colors.

[Laubender]

christophj79940440  wrote

… I have to split the guideline for "checking" and limit every export to max 27 spot colors.

Hi Christoph,

so you are lucky and not more than 27 spot colors are presented on one page.

On the other hand it should be possible to convert RGB or CMYK filled shapes to spot in Acrobat Pro DC using Illustrator for editing.
Or perhaps using Acrobat preflight rules.

Regards,
Uwe

[rob day]

they want to check the colors used in the guideline via acrobat

They can still use Acrobat's Object Inspector to get the names of all of the spot colors. The limit is actually the number of separation plates that can be output—I doubt anyone needs to output 40 plates.

So here's the entire Pantone Coated library as a grid of fills and exported as spot colors, but rather than checking the swatches output values, which are subject to the separation limit I can use Object Inspector, which gives me the fill as Separation along with the spot color name:

[christophj79940440]

Thank you very much. That is helpful.