PDF repair advice required.

My printer received a file from a client that he intended to farm out to another printer but it was rejected by the ink police. So he gave it to me to see if I can fix it.

After looking at it I can see that all the images are in srgb. The file has been produced in Publisher apparently and then made into a pdf via distiller if I am to believe the pdf document info.

After looking at the file it is an incredible mess. I opened some of the (30) pages in illustrator. All the images are sliced into tiny pieces. There are some images that are only 5x7cm but are in 5 slices!. Not only that but all the type is not in one piece. Most pages have each letter on a separate layer, as editable type!! weird.

I have discovered that I can select all the slices and copy them as a single piece to paste into Photoshop. When looking at the separations in Acrobat it indicates that the type is only printing as 100%k which is a good thing.

My question is basically this... Is there a way to somehow convert all the tiny sliced image files to cmyk and leave everything as it is, (and will it print OK if I do this) or is this file such a fracking mess that it *has* to be rebuilt entirely in Indesign?

Let me know if any more info is required. Thanks.

I'm only using 6. This is not something I hope to be doing a lot of. It's more of a favour. After looking at the file a bit more I can see that there are big blocks of black on each page that are showing four colour. I suppose this is where the problem is, but I can't see any way of changing this to 100%K without having the original file.

One thing that has me puzzled is where exactly the cmyk conversion is to take place. The images in the file are sRGB but is this file rgb or cmyk, or at what point does it get converted. I can look at the cmyk separations but I don't know if the file is really separated or it is just a virtual view. Like in Indesign or Illy a file is either in cmyk or rgb and is converted when the pdf is output. But in this case I've got a pdf that appears to be output for rgb but I can still see the cmyk separations.