SECTION 10.10
969
Prepress Support
KEY
TYPE
VALUE
Colorants
dictionary
(Optional; PDF 1.4)
A dictionary identifying the individual colorants
associated with a printer’s mark, such as a color bar. For each entry in this
dictionary, the key is a colorant name and the value is an array defining a
Separation
color space for that colorant (see “Separation Color Spaces” on
10.10.3 Separation Dictionaries
In high-end printing workflows, pages are ultimately produced as sets of
separa-
tions,
one per colorant (see “Separation Color Spaces” on page 264). Ordinarily,
each page in a PDF file is treated as a composite page that paints graphics objects
using all the process colorants and perhaps some spot colorants as well. In other
words, all separations for a page are generated from a single PDF description of
that page.
In some workflows, however, pages are
preseparated
before generating the PDF
file. In a preseparated PDF file, the separations for a page are described as sepa-
rate page objects, each painting only a single colorant (usually specified in the
DeviceGray
color space). When this is done, additional information is needed to
identify the actual colorant associated with each separation and to group together
the page objects representing all the separations for a given page. This informa-
tion is contained in a
separation dictionary (PDF 1.3)
in the
SeparationInfo
entry
of each page object (see “Page Objects” on page 144). Table 10.50 shows the con-
tents of this type of dictionary.
TABLE 10.50 Entries in a separation dictionary
KEY
TYPE
VALUE
Pages
array
(Required)
An array of indirect references to page objects representing separa-
tions of the same document page. One of the page objects in the array must be
the one with which this separation dictionary is associated, and all of them must
have separation dictionaries (
SeparationInfo
entries) containing
Pages
arrays
identical to this one.
(Required)
The name of the device colorant to be used in rendering this separa-
tion, such as
Cyan
or
PANTONE 35 CV
.
DeviceColorant
name or
string