Color and BW Printing

[Mike L.]

I work for a volunteer baseball league (NPO) and we're printing 5,000
programs for a few upcoming tournaments. We have a printer in house
that can do it and is on lease... the only problem is the printer is
completely annoying and reads almost all pages as color. Our program is
both black and white (38) pages, with 5 color ads and the rest BW,
however when we print it set as "Automatic" under our print settings
(which are different from printer to printer obviously), it counts it
as 38 color pages... which costs $.06 apeice as opposed to $.01 apeice.
We're an NPO, we can't afford the extra $8k it costs to print entirely
in color.

So, the question, is there any way to set print properties specific to
each page? I want to set 33 of the pages to print BW and the other 5 to
print color and can't concieve of any way to do that.

The only other way I can think to do it is make 2 documents, one with
all the color, one with all the BW with blank pages where the other
would go... print it, put it back in and print the other. I have
tinkered with this, but I am having a hell of a time because I would
have to reverse the print order... I completely screw up when I try to
do that in publisher and it would take WAAAAAAY too long to do
manually.

I should mention that the printer binds the documents automatically,
which is why I don't print them separatly then combine.

Thanks for any help!


Mike Lippert
(e-mail address removed)
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Matt Beals]

Need more information about the printer. Typically the print controllers
look at the header of the job and determine which "click" to charge to. So
it is entirely reasonable to assume that since you are using Publisher and
printing composite to the printer that the printer will detect the entire
job as "color", CMYK actually, and bill you accordingly.

There are a couple of ways to deal with this.

One way is to print the black and white pages as grayscale to the printer.
This should force the printer to charge you for a "black" click. Then on the
pages that are color and black and white (color on one side, black on the
other) you print the black side first as grascale. Then send the color page
through. Kind of a pain in the arse, but the least expensive.

The other way is to use something like Enfocus PitStop Professional or Apago
PDF Enhancer to find all that RGB black and gray Publisher (and all the
office apps produce) and substitute device gray (black and white for the
printer) and make all the color (RGB) CMYK for the printer.

Now depending on which printer you use and the controller there are some
other options. Some of them are a bit "messy" and some are not so bad. It
just depends, there are a lot of variables in this situation.

Which printer and controller are you using? If you want, send me the a PDF
of it and I'll show you what PitStop or PDF Enhancer can do to fix it. They
make a big difference.

--
Matt Beals
Consultant
Enfocus Certified Trainer, Markzware Recognized Trainer
(206) 618-2537 - Cell
mailto:[email protected]

Come visit me at:
http://www.mattbeals.com
http://www.actionlistexchange.net
http://mattbeals.com/blog/

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