Creating spot color PDFs with InDesign CS2

[cloudshift]

First off, this is my first post. Lots of great, helpful information here... So, thanks in advance, hopefully you can help me with my issue.

A little background about me. I'm the one and only prepress guy at a small print shop in FL. We do stuff for the music industry; CD packaging, record covers, posters, CD replication, DVD plackaging/replication etc. etc. We have a plate setter and an image setter... I mostly go direct to plate now, but we farm out some stuff and that's when I need to create PDFs.

I'm trying to create spot color PDFs from InDesign CS2, and I'm having some problems. Here's the setup:

I'm placing a DCS 2.0 spot color image, with 3 spots. I want to export a press optimized PDF to upload to a printer we use for larger runs, or other spot color type stuff. I could always just export from InDesign CS and not have a problem, but now in CS2, the PDFs don't look right at all, and the plates look nothing like they should... The same files export from CS fine, it's CS2 that's giving me hard times. I'm hoping to phase out CS, so I'd like to figure this out. Any information about creating spot color PDFs from InDesign would be appreciated... I must be doing something wrong.

This stuff will be run on an offset press on Neenah Paper - Environment - Sedona Red (in case you would like to know ;-)

Thanks much!
Brad

[Franca]

Welcome, Brad! I'm sorry I don't use InDesign but other folks here do, so will try to wave somebody over here for you. :-)

[Craig]

Try using PDF-X1a settings. This will preserve spot colors. You may have to print to the Acrobat print driver to do this.

[cloudshift]

Try using PDF-X1a settings. This will preserve spot colors. You may have to print to the Acrobat print driver to do this.

Outputting a PDF using the standard setting for PDF-X1a didn't work for me. The spot colors show up in the color palette in InDesign, but previewing the separations (in InDesign) show same results as other PDF options... The plates just look all cattywampus!

I've set up everything exactly the same as my previous PDF settings for CS, and the PDFs do not separate correctly... I can't figure out what it is. I've tried just about every sort of combination I can think of, and nothing is working for me... For now, I'm still using CS and hoping to find a cure some day... If I do, I'll post my solution immmediately!

Thanks for the welcome and the ideas... Maybe I'm just doing something really silly, and the problem is just me!

Best,
Brad

[Craig]

Try PDF-x1a will not make the PDF if it is not x1a compliant. Only works for spot and cmyk colors.