A loyal reader used the Hire the Geek service to have me do some research on a CorelDRAW file and the resulting PDF file. When this reader presented the PDF for printing, they were told it contained “rich black”.

My first step was to look carefully at the CorelDRAW file. It had color specified as CMYK and every instance of black was C0Y0M0K100 which is just black. In short, I found nothing in the CorelDRAW file that needed to be corrected.

I then looked at the PDF file using Adobe Acrobat (the full version, not the free reader). It has prepress tests it can run and the file reported no rich black objects. So I’m wondering if the printer didn’t look at the updated version of the file.

When I gave the results to the reader, she commented that she had imported the PDF back into CorelDRAW for testing. This is never a way to accurately test a file. If things aren’t right, was the PDF file wrong or didn’t it get changed as part of the import process. Should you need to test a PDF file, you have to use a tool designed for that kind of testing.