Licorice and True Black.

Colour Viewer with Crayon Box

For print projects, especially when you deal with commercial (professional) printshops, consider changing default black colour in Pages to whay they call 'true black.'

It gives better quality.

Default black colour in Pages is in fact a composite colour.

In text inspector click on the Colour wheel to open Colour Viewer. It shows the Crayon Box.



Click on Sliders (second icon from left), then click on the drop down menu and choose CMYK.
CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (Key colour).

Licorice in CMYK

Drag C, M, Y to zero and K to 100%.

Click away to deselect text and save.

True black

'True Black': How-to

True black

A reader asks:
I have a problem. When I send a project to a professinal printing company they complain that the text in pages isn't 100 percent black. It's in CMYK.

I've written here about 100 percent black text in CMYK files – 'true black'. But it seems that quite a lot of Pages users stumble upon this when they go to printers.

Here is how to do it:
- select all text in your document;
- in Text Inspector click on the colour well (the bar with which you change colour);
- when Colour Viewer opens, click on the Slides option (second from left);
- choose CMYK in the drop-down menu and set CMY to zero, and K (black) to 100 percent.



Repeat the same for text boxes and captions.

 That should give you what they call 'true black'.



Licorice

The problem occurs when you use a preset black for your document, for example Licorice from the Crayons Box in the Colour Viewer. It looks black, but in fact is a composite of several basic colours - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. Professional printers prefer 'true black', because it gives text the best crispness on paper.