From illustrator to pdf, color changes - help?

ok this is starting to make me nuts. i'm designing my wedding ';save the date'; cards, because i was planning on printing them myself to save some money. well, i've designed the entire thing in illustrator, in CMYK, and it looks great on the screen. but after i save as a pdf the colors change slightly. its less noticable onscreen, but as soon as you print it you can tell. especially black. its very gray. my printer is cmyk with additional r%26amp;g inks as well. if i print directly from illustrator the colors are completely different. it seems like its the pdf thats changing it. how can i fix this?

should i just do it in quark? i know there is a different in ';black'; and ';registration'; when it comes to printing from there, registration comes out much blacker in color.

either way i wanted to print as pdfs so i could do multiple per sheet (i dont know if i can do this in either program)From illustrator to pdf, color changes - help?
Ok. So, here's the thing, you've a great solution to your problem. However, it seems to me that you might need a few quick tips about - Quark, Color Management, and PDFs....



In a nutshell, you can get more indepth with my answers at www.xtrain.com.... but here's the gist...



If you have quark, wich would suprise me at this juncture as most people just buy the creative suite of Adobe - thus meaning you would probably have InDesign? Use InDesign to layout your pages.. no matter what application you use, black vs. Registration is always going to do this.. black is just the black ink put on paper where as registration is all CMYK colors placed on top of each other to give a rich black.. personally if the stars aren't aligned, it never looks good to me... if you just want a black to pop, make it 40% Cyan and 100% Black... (make a new color in your swatches palette)....



So then we need to talk about your 101 of color management... and my rule of thumb is what you see on screen is not what you get... (oh and we're mixing PDF compression on top of the game)... so - my advice here is - #1 by making the PDF your compressing the file and risk color shifts, if you are not using a ';for press'; setting.... #2 make sure all of your applications are properly color managed (using the same color configs etc) and your printer has to understand the colors it's been given. There are plenty of printers on the market that are notorious for - in essence - taking the original color values of CMYK - converting them to RGB - then converting them to CMYK again because - well that's how the printer driver works they are there to ';help'; consumers, personally they just frustrate me.



Ultimately, if I were you, I'd make the artboard bigger in AI and resize %26amp; duplicate the image to fit more on your paper.From illustrator to pdf, color changes - help?
Okay so here is my suggestion. Do your entire design in illustrator then when you are finished save it as an image file and not a pdf. Then create a sheet that has however many of each you want on a page, save that as ';insertfilenamehere';page. Then just duplicate that again and again. Good luck