How do I print in multicolor from Adobe Pagemaker 7?

Question

I'm working on a 4-page newsletter for my college, and the only publishing software I'm good with is Adobe Pagemaker.

I've completed 2 pages already, and they look real good. But the problem I knew nothing about is that the printing press here does not ("cannot", as they told me) print anything in multicolor if it isn't made on Photoshop. They told me it isn't possible to print in multicolor from Pagemaker.

My college professors have specifically instructed me to print the newsletter in multicolor.

The only thing I could think about was to convert the Pagemaker file to PDF format and then import it to Photoshop and print it that way. But I'm afraid that will end up compromising the resolution and the overall quality of the print.

I would be very grateful if anyone could show me a way out of this.

Answer 1

I have not seing Pagemaker in 15 years. I have no idea if you have spot colors paletes there.

Doing the PDF export ot Photoshop has no sense becouse you will end with a cmyk or rgb file.

A little introduction

If you print in at least 2 colors, you have a multicolor print. As simple as that.

A verey specific multi-color printing is using the cyan, magenta, yellow and black fo have a full color printing. But in some programs and systems you can use specific colors, for example a blue and a red form a pizza box. You don't need a full color printing there.

The way to prepare it is using Spot colors. You choose your "tomato red" and your specific "pizza blue color"

It seems Pagemaker can't use tat kind of spot color palete.

A workarround inside Pagemaker

One thing you can do is using the channel black for your texts and using another CMYK channel, let's say the magenta, for some other things like a line, the bullets etc.

Generate your normal pdf for printing and tell them to use ONLY the black channel and the magenta channel.

That way you have a 2 channel information. You now can tell them to use another color for each channel. For example lets keep the black as black and use ruby red, or reflex blue or whatever on the other channel.

A suggestion

Try to use a more modern program. One free is Scribus. http://sourceforge.net/projects/scribus/

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Edited

Scott pointed that you can gave spot colors in pagemaker. I can't help you there but you can explore:

1) Use spot colors, and use just one to begin with.

2) Explore the pdf settings so you don't convert the pdf to another color mode.