Create Black and White PDF from Oracle Reports

Question

I have an Oracle Report that must be in pure Black and White. It contains two images which have been converted into Monochrome bitmaps before being inserted onto the report.

When the report is executed, the resulting PDF appears to be in black and white. When I view the colour separations in Adobe Acrobat Professional, the image has Cyan, Magenta and Yellow separations.

I have tried converting the image to a number of formats supported by Oracle including JPG, TIF & GIF but it makes no difference.

The application we use to run the report is an ASP.NET web application in C#. We have the iTextSharp library for PDF manipulation.

Is there any Oracle Report setting or C# code that can ensure the PDF created by Oracle Reports is pure Black and White?

Answer 1

I think acrobat pro always shows CMYK even if you just have black if you have a CMYK simulation profile selected. You should be able to verify that there is no CMY by turning the black separation off in output preview.

If you really want a programmatic solution you can use enfocus library with a preflight profile that gives an error if: - Number of separations > 0 - (Don't count black) - (Don't count if tint is 0%)

There should be an action list to convert CMYK to Grey if you want to automatically fix the document.

However Pitstop Library is C rather than C#, but it should be possible to build a wrapper.

Answer 2

The ABCpdf library for .NET can be used to recolor PDF documents (i.e. convert CMYK images to black and white). More information can be found at http://www.websupergoo.com/abcpdf-1.htm.