How to print greyscale with Mono export

Dorico
1

I’m printing a project using an offset press, and it has to be B/W. Any color elements will get flagged in pre-flight by the printer and have to be corrected and re-submitted.

I’m wanting to do some editorial marks at 40% opacity, but if I print in Mono, Dorico ignores all opacity changes. If I print in Color, blacks print as CMYK. No good.

Is there a way I can work around this limitation in Dorico? There are only a few frequently-used glyphs I need to be grey, so I’m happy to consider workarounds, but there will be hundreds of them… so I’m hoping I can do this in Dorico.

2

Is there any possibility to print CMYK? In which case you need ‘True Black’ for black which is usually C:75, M:68, Y:76, K:90. Then the 40% grey issue goes away. But perhaps you know this. Other than this, I have no idea!

Unusual to have offset that can only print B/W I should have thought.

3

This seems like a bug in Dorico’s print process (and graphics export). There should a difference between 40% K and K with 40% opacity.

Opacity is held on the alpha channel, which is only available in Colour colorspaces, whereas 40% K should be achievable in a single-ink space.

Is that true if you export a Color PDF, and then print it Mono?

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4

They can print color, but it’s a ~20% price increase!

5

I’ll try it, but there will be a large number of files in this project, so I don’t relish the double work (if that works).

6

What’s the exact workflow? Presumably you’re sending PDF files to the printing firm anyway. You’re not printing directly from a Mac to offset!

7

Yes, I’m preparing the PDF and sending it out for pre-flight. I suppose there’s a possibility they would be willing to convert to grayscale on their end, or I could perhaps figure out how to convert it in Acrobat once the final document is ready.

8

Would asking @Philip_R be productive?

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9

Buy 40% K is not ‘true grey’. To get paper printed black and grey you have to use ‘true black’ ink proportions as mentioned above. Pure K always looks greyish, even brownish, and muddy.

10

If you’re printing only with one ink, your only option is to use halftoning to reduce the appearance of Black to become grey.

IF you’re printing CMYK, then you can add amounts of C and M to strengthen the black, certainly – usually for things like large blocks of solid colour.

Looking at any piece of music printed on offset disproves this.

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11

This is probably the best way. @dan_kreider , see this post and scroll down to the section “Update: Make any PDF true black”. Create a droplet to automate this process and then drag all of your Dorico-generated color PDFs to it.

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12

Have you managed to get the droplets to work on Apple Silicon? I recall this being a limitation fairly recently so I created Guided Actions instead where you can feed it entire folders.

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Isn’t this formula you refer to a “Rich Black”?

True black should be 0,0,0,100. AFAIK, of course.

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14

Yes. If you get a message that the droplet is damaged and should be moved to the Trash, go to you Mac’s System Settings > Privacy & Security, scroll down, and click the Open Anyway button, and the confirm by clicking Open.

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