Printing pdf and color management

[Thomas_Fuhrmann]

Hi,

I'm currently testing the default printing service offered by ArcGIS Server 11.1. When I export a pdf using the Export Web Map task, the colors in the pdf appear pale in Adobe Acrobat Pro and pinkish in Firefox. In Chrome and Edge the colors are correct. Do you know what could cause these inconsistencies?

[David_McRitchie]

This sounds like it might be caused by differences in the colour settings. In Adobe Acrobat you may want to check this under Edit > Accessibility.

Hope that helps,

David

[Thomas_Fuhrmann]

Thanks for the reply @David_McRitchie! I checked replacing document colors already, but it didn't change the pale appearance. I attached an example as a reference.

[David_McRitchie]

Hey Thomas, I am not 100% certain, but given the example that does not seem to be a change in the colour mode.

I have Enterprise 11 that I will be upgrading to 11.1 next week so I will see if I can reproduce this.

David

[David_McRitchie]

Hey @Thomas_Fuhrmann I gave this a test and did not encounter the same issue. I think in this case it would be good to check the resulting pdf on a different machine and see if the appearance matches. 

This will help identify if the print service is outputing the file in a different colour mode, or if the software i changing this.

On the file you sent the print preview shows the reddish glint, but downloading this and viewing on Adobe Acrobat shows the correct colours.

David

[andrewdc_tt]

We are experiencing colour issues following an upgrade to ArcGIS Enterprise 11.1 as well, but we are using a custom print service. After some investigation, it appears to be related to the colour management setting on the layout files the services references - however both RGB and CMYK options both cause different kind of colour issue - RGB makes all the layout vector elements pale and off colour, while CMYK washes out the background basemap.

When the same layouts are used and exported in ArcGIS Pro, this colour issue isn't present, so if I had to guess, the server now isn't doing the colour management correctly? 

[Thomas_Fuhrmann]

Thanks for the info @andrewdc_tt ! Interesting hint with the layout files! I will check that too. I tested it with custom print services too and had the same problems. Do you have any idea how to change the server's colour management?

[andrewdc_tt]

@Thomas_Fuhrmann good to know we aren't the only ones! It's just a guess at this point based on the behaviour, but we are hoping to get our local Esri support on to it at some point. Keen to hear if anyone else has the same issue or a solution!

Edit: it also only seems to happen when exporting to PDF, the same map's colours looks fine when exported to PNG format.

[Thomas_Fuhrmann]

@andrewdc_ttSame for me. PNG works fine, just pdf is causing these issues.

[andrewdc_tt]

Just as an update to this, in our situation we found that the issue was being caused by having a modified Python environment on the ArcGIS Server running the print service, and restoring the default Python environment resolved the issue.