Topic awaiting preservation: color separations of pdf

I work for a small newspaper that is slowly making its way into the modern world ... we actually still do pasteups on boards here. However, we do paginate our classifieds and our color front pages.

Another paper that works "under" us so to speak (they are even smaller than us and send their paper to us to print) is experimenting with sending pages to us to print color. Today they sent their front page to us as a pdf file. The problem is we can't get the color separations to print. The black plate prints, but the other three plates come out as blanks.

My coworker has a program called pdfinspektor which checks for problems in a pdf file. One of the problems it detects is that the photos are "ICCBased Adobe CMYK" What the heck does that mean? Is that causing the photos to not separate? What other setting should I look at? Is this even something we can solve on our end or is it a problem only fixable at the source?

We also put the pdf file into Quark and tried to print, but same problem, no separations.

Today is pretty much shot, deadline is passed. The front page is going to press as black and white. What things can I look at to troubleshoot this tomorrow morning?

BeeKay
Murphy's 50 Laws of Combat Operations
11. Try to look unimportant -- the enemy may be low on ammo.
23. When in doubt -- empty your magazine.

OK, never mind.
Source had wrong settings on their pdf distiller. Even after correcting that, still can't print separations from pdf cause our RIP is an older version and doesn't support pdf files. So, we dropped the pdf into Quark and printed. Finally worked, all four plates printed fine.

Ain't print fun!

BeeKay
Murphy's 50 Laws of Combat Operations
11. Try to look unimportant -- the enemy may be low on ammo.
23. When in doubt -- empty your magazine.

Yes!

Well.

Good...job...there.

~cough~