Colours that look OK online and when printed

["Stuart Burnfield" <stuartb@xxxxxxxxxx>]

My client's product is a purple box shaped somewhat like a VCR. They
have asked that the correct colours be used in illustrations, to make
them consistent with all the other product and marketing materials.
The main format for distributing the manuals is PDF.

The most common ways a user is likely to see the illustrations are:
- viewing the PDF in colour on the screen
- printing a few pages or the whole manual from the PDF on an in-
  house laser

A few copies will be printed and bound professionally and shipped on
request but these won't be in colour -- the colours will be printed
as shades of grey.


The Problem: The darkish purple looks fine on the screen but when I
print drafts on a 600 dpi laser printer it comes out not darkish
grey but almost black. This tends to swamp some of the detail in
the illustrations and gives the page a sort of 'censored' look :^)

The bound manuals should be OK, as I've found Docutechs are vastly
better at handling shades of grey than are typical office printers.

If necessary I could ship to customers a second 'for printing'
version of the PDF using shades tuned for greyscale printing, but
before I do that I just wonder if there's a way to make printing
from the 'for viewing' version more legible.

Can I do anything in Frame or Acrobat to make colours print in
a lighter shade than they would normally? I could suggest to the
client that we cheat and use a slightly lighter purple, but I
already have to wear sunglasses to work on the illustrations.
BTW the illos are created in Canvas and imported to Frame as PDFs.

Thanks
---
Stuart Burnfield
Gentoo Communications
mailto:stuartb@tpg.com.au


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