[pdftex] color-separation with PDFTex

[William F. Adams]

On Aug 28, 2005, at 2:16 PM, Andreas Demant wrote:

> is it possible to generate color-seperated PDF's?

Yes. See poligraf.sty and others on CTAN. There's also a brief bit on 
it in _The LaTeX Companion, 2nd Edition_

> I want a black PDF and a color-PDF without black, so i could print the 
> black
> version on a normal laser-printer and only the colors with a 
> colorlaser.

That's not really colour separation. There's been some discussion of 
this sort of thing on comp.text.tex though.

If you're planning on running the b/w printed pages through a color 
laser to add the colour images this is _not_ recommended, is probably 
forbidden by the manufacturer's guidelines and bids fair to ruin your 
color laserprinter when the black toner bubbles and fuses and flakes 
off inside of it and gums up the works.

That said, it can be done w/ an inkjet, though registration is 
problematical enough to make it a false economy IMO.

The easiest way to do what you wish is to have an option for the file 
and hook into the macros so all of the black text is set as white in 
the color version and the color text is printed as white and color 
graphics &c. are omitted in the b/w.

Making two separate .pdfs, one of b/w only pages, and another of colour 
pages only can be done by writing out files w/ a list of pages (one for 
b/w, the other for colour) in a format suitable to be post-processed by 
the pdfpages package to extract the pages into two separate files.

William

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