Adobe PDF printer instance - ICM Colour Managment settings

[@adobeforums.com]

I just upgraded to Acrobat 8 Professional today.

I notice that whilst some settings have changed to be more helpful (eg that confusing old "Do not send fonts to Adobe PDF" checkbox is not "Rely on system fonts only; do not use document fonts"), others are still the same old same old.

I have a long standing query with what some of the colour management settings mean: if you right-click on the Adobe PDF printer instance, wade through the "Adobe PDF Printing Preferences" dialog, click "Advanced" and finally reach a dialog called "Adobe PDF Convertor Advanced Options".

The same old "Image Color Management" > "ICM Method" setting is here,
with the traditional options of "ICM Disabled", "ICM Handled by Host System", "ICM Handled by Printer", and "ICM Handled by Printer using Printer Calibration". If you press F1, you do get a little help pop-up.

I have never understood this - can anyone shed any light?
What confuses me is this "Host Computer" and "Printer" terminology. Is the "Printer" the virtual Adobe PDF printer instance? Is the "Host Computer" the application you're printing from? (e.g. Adobe FrameMaker?)
It just seems like the help pop-up is referring to a generic situation with a hardware PostScript printer, rather than this special virtual printer.

I ask this every time a new version of Acrobat comes out, and no-one ever seems to know :) Any takers this year?

[d***@adobeforums.com]

The properties you are referring to are part of the Adobe Postscript driver and are not part of Acrobat, but part of the printer that the driver belongs to, in this case that printer is the adobe pdf printer. The actual driver is made by MS and is indeed a generic driver that can be used with any Postscript printing device, be it a proper tangible hardware outputting device, or a virtual printer like the Adobe PDF printer.

First up as always, if you've no idea what it is all about, leave the settings to their default.

The settings determine how Colour management should be handled when a GDI application prints to the PS driver. Applications that generate their own PS (like Acrobat and Frame) do not use these settings as they have their own.

So yes it is a generic driver, that is not dependent on the Acrobat version at all.

[@adobeforums.com]

I do have an "idea" what it is all about, the problem is that the documentation (help tooltip) does not explain it properly :-/

I would be happy to leave things to their default settings if I always got consistent colour between screen and print all the time... :)

Anyways, I thought FrameMaker *did* print to the Windows GDI to generate PS (which Distiller then converts to PDF)?
For the sake of argument, if that was the case, would FrameMaker thus be the "host computer" in this terminology?

[A***@adobeforums.com]

I think the host system would probably be Windows color management,
converting from source to destination profile after Frame sends it,
then passing the converted data to PostScript.

Aandi Inston

[@adobeforums.com]

Hmmm....... if that were the case, would Windows then think that "destination profile" was the ICM colour profile I'd assigned to the Adobe PDF Printer instance in it's "Colour Management" tab? (by default when you install Acrobat, the Adobe PDF printer instance doesn't have a colour profile associated with it)
There's no way to assign source colour profiles within Frame, is there?

[A***@adobeforums.com]

No, I don't think Frame has any color management. So some kind of
default profile (sRGB? Monitor?) would be used for source. The target
would have to be the printer profile, though what happens if that is a
CMYK profile is anyone's guess as the PostScript is RGB.

Aandi Inston

[@adobeforums.com]

I'm looking forward to using Windows Vista, when apparently there's a new feature which makes all these things "better" :)