Corrupt Illustrator Circles

[PaulGA]

Hi folks,
Is anybody experiencing problems with Illustrator whereby a circle that looks perfectly smooth on screen prints out of Quark through a RIP and ends up taking a hexagonal shape?

I can resolve this by taking the same image and pasting this into a brand new document but given the production environment I work in this is not practical.

Any thoughts will be very welcome

Paul

 

[blueark]

It sounds like the output resolution settings are too low in Illustrator. In earlier versions of Illustrator, this was a big problem, but you could fix it by looking at the Attributes palette, selecting an object, and changing the resolution there (preferably to 800dpi or more). In Illustrator 10, it's a bit easier. File > Document Setup, and select 'Printing & Export' in the drop down list. Make sure it's 800dpi, and resave the document.

 

[PaulGA]

Thanks for the reply.
I've already checked the output settings and they were at 800dpi. I also tried increasing them to 2400dpi earlier on as well but this didn't work. There was some improvement but not enough. Incidently I'm using AI 10, the graphic was created in AI 8 and output using Quark 5.

The strange thing about this problem as I've discovered subsequent to posting this mail is that enlarging the same graphic by 500% in Quark left the circles uncorrupt on output. However, having the graphic five times bigger isn't of much use to me naturally enough!

I know how to fix the problem but I'd rather not do it by creating a new file. Its not very practical to do this with dozens of supplied images, as you'd have position the image in exactly the same location in the new document to keep things sweet with Quark.

 

[blueark]

It's a strange problem. One thing I'd point out is that you don't have to position the image accurately in Illustrator, as Quark gets it's measurements based on the extent of the objects rather than the page. In other words, if you place a picture in Quark, go back to the Illustrator file and move everything, updating the image in the Quark file won't result in the image moving anywhere. At least it shouldn't!

I'll have a think about it and see if I can find any info. I would have thought that enlarging the image would have made the problem worse, but that's obviously not the case. The only suggestion I have for the moment is to make sure you've installed any updates available on Adobe's site.