Adobe® Acrobat® 9 PDF Bible

Chapter 31. Printing to Desktop Color Printers

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 32.

Setting Up the Work Environment

No special editing tools are required for desktop color printing. There is a special toolbar for Print Production, but you won't need any of the Print Production tools to print to your desktop printer. To maximize your space in Acrobat, reset the toolbars to their default positions. Open a context menu on the Toolbar Well and select Reset Toolbars.

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 ...