27 colors limit in Acrobat 9 Output Preview tool?

[zoran]

I need confirmation that Acrobat 9 Output preview see "only" 27 spot colors?
PDF itself is ok and has 30 or more spot colors, which can be verified with Pitstop, they even print fine on Nexpress, according to formula, however Output Preview tool in Acrobat 9 displays only first 27 colors and shows other spot colors as process conversion only.

I tried googling and found limitation in PS to be 27 spot colors, but nothing about Acrobat and PDF.

Thanks

[leonardr]

I need confirmation that Acrobat 9 Output preview see "only" 27 spot colors

Yes, we are aware of that limitation in the Acrobat 9 Output Preview UI. But, as you note, the file will display and print correctly and remains a valid PDF file.

And please feel free to shoot the person that created such a file .

Leonard

[LoneGoose]

"they even print fine on Nexpress..."

At lease it seems like it's being printed digitally, and no one's expecting you to actually run it through an offset press 27 or so times!

Why leave them all as spots, though? Do you need to tweak each one on your front end / rip?

[almaink]

Only time I've ever seen a file like that, was for a map.

[Joe]

I get them all the time. Some people feel they are being cheated if they don't user every spot color available.

[kyle]

Leonard:

Maybe you could add a warning when a user selects a spot color library that reads "Please note: this is not your box of crayons."

[mattbeals]

One of my native file preflight procedures was to remove all unused colors from InDesign or Illustrator. Helped the confusion a bit when they had their "standard" library applied to every document. We worked with one particular bank, a insurance company and a electronics manufactures that all worked off templates. Those templates had their "approved" color palettes loaded in them. So there was always a ton of unused, yet defined, Pantone and custom colors. Ugh... How annoying...

[zoran]

Sorry for late reply, had to spend day outside the work.
Thank you Leonard for confirmation.
I agree with posters above, same experience here, however no conspiracy on this one.
We were actually making Brochure for our clients with nice spot patches that utilize 5th unit on Nexpress to expand gamut and get nice representation of Pantone spot library.
Hence 30 to 33 spot colors per page.
I assumed it worked correctly since the result was correct from Nexpress, I was just puzzled why it won't display all colors properly in Output Preview.
Now that mystery is resolved, thanks to Leonard.

[kansasquaker]

I had a document with 57 spot colors once - back then you could only output like 29 different separations from Illustrator. I don't know what the limit is now. I had to change all of them to process just to get to the pdf output dialog. I printed out the screen capture of the error message and attached it to the billing section of the ticket.

[david]

I saw a job once for Disney that had 13 inks actually being printed. Whats the most you've printed?