Script (or some other means) to convert RGB to CMYK in PDF?

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This answer is not for Illustrator, but for ‘some other tool’, namely Ghostscript (download gs871w32.exe or gs871w64.exe).

Ghostscript allows you to ‘re-distill’ PDFs (without an intermediate conversion to PostScript, the dreaded ‘refrying’ detour). Try this command:

gswin32c.exe ^
    -o c:/path/to/output-cmyk.pdf ^
    -sDEVICE=pdfwrite ^
    -dUseCIEColor ^
    -sProcessColorModel=DeviceCMYK ^
    -sColorConversionStrategy=CMYK ^
    -sColorConversionStrategyForImages=CMYK ^
     input-rgb.pdf

And if you are able to wait for a few more weeks, Ghostscript 9.00 will be released. This new version will sport support of colormanagement (based on LCMS) with ICC profiles for the first time ever…

UPDATE: I updated above command because I missed to put in the option to also convert images.

Update 2

If color conversion does not work as desired and if you see a message like “Unable to convert color space to Gray, reverting strategy to LeaveColorUnchanged” then…

  1. your Ghostscript probably is a newer release from the 9.x version series, and
  2. your source PDF likely uses an embedded ICC color profile

In this case add -dOverrideICC to the command line and see if it changes the result as desired.

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