I have an Illustrator file that contains a number of icons that are "Placed" transparent Photoshop files (i.e. they were never flattened so there is no white background in any of these placed icon files). The Illustrator file is being printed by a commercial printer on silver vinyl and then cut on a cutting machine. Before giving the file to the printer I have been instructed to do the Object => Flatten Transparency operation to make sure that no artifacts are created during this process. (The file must be flattened because the cutting machine requires that this be done.) My problem is that when I do this a white rectangle artifact is created around each of the icons--and obviously this is not what I want to see when I am printing on silver vinyl! (I have read that one way to ensure that these artifacts are not created would be to select the layer containing all the icons, and then select the layer underneath it, so that the icons are flattened "onto" something. But in this case, there is no "layer beneath!") Does anyone know of a type of "fake" layer that I could put under the icons that would make the Flattening process work--but not impact the look of the silver vinyl? Does anyone have any other type of solution? (I am new to Illustrator and am basically desperate to get this problem solved!) BTW I tried to upload a small sample file to include as an attachment--but I couldn't figure out how to do it! If anyone is willing to help, I can easily email them this sample file. Thank you very much in advance.

...preserve "alpha transperency" needs to be turned on in flattening options...

...the other way would be to export to PDFx 1a format and flatten the transparency on output to a PDF file...it's essentailly the same process, just not done in illustrator directly.

andrew

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