Adobe® Acrobat® X PDF Bible

Chapter 28. Printing to Desktop Color Printers

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding color management

• Choosing a color workspace

• Understanding color profiles

• Printing fundamentals

• Understanding how color is managed at print time

• Printing to desktop color printers

• Printing comments and form field data

One of the primary problems many Acrobat users experience is printing files with proper color. Notwithstanding any problems with printing fonts and getting a print out, the most problematic issues with printing PDFs that contain graphic images is accurate reproduction of color. Whether you are a creative professional or a novice to graphic design, some basic issues need to be understood when printing any kind of document containing images or other graphics to a desktop color printer.

This chapter is concerned with printing to local printers of the desktop variety from Acrobat viewers, and remarks made in this chapter are not intended for commercial printing. For professional printing and prepress, take a look at Chapter 29.

Understanding Color Management

Quite a bit can be said about color management, and certainly more attention can be devoted to it than I have room for in this book. Quite simply, there are three basic areas you need to address in creating a color-managed workflow:

• Monitor calibration. There are software tools on both Windows and the Mac that can help you calibrate your monitor to eliminate color casts and color tints and set the gamma (neutral midtone grays) of your monitor. I won't ...