Printing promblems when using Shadows/Transparency

[Procab]

I'm working in a firm, who has recently jumped to Indesign.
It semes like if we are using some of the effects shadow/tranparency, then either white boxes appears under the shadow area, or if there er placed images below, (We are working with OPI solution on Mac) then it prints the low resolution images instead.???????????

 

[jimoblak]

Do these white boxes appear in PDFs or on printed pages? This is all related to the transparency - - which some printers cannot handle without some tweaking with the print dialog - - or maybe not at all. You should also avoid transparency effects with overlapping colors of different models (spot, cmyk, rgb).

 

[AdobeTim]

I'd need to learn more about the workflow in order to answer this. Is the job an EPS, PDF (what version), native ID file, PS file? The transparency feature doesn't support an OPI workflow at the moment. Transparency effects must necessarily be flattened into two dimensional, opaque Postscript when you create EPS, PDF 1.3, or PostScript. If the app doesn't have access to the hi-res data at the time this flattening occurs, all it can use is the low-res version that's been placed in the document.

If you want to learn the ins and outs of printing transparency from Adobe apps, you can get a PDF from the Adobe website on that subject: <

http://partners.adobe.com/asn/service/indesign/PDFS/TPrintGuide.pdf>

 

[Procab]

It's an Indesign 2.02 doc, which is converted to pdf from Indesign, and the white boxes that appears in pdf also appears on print.

I'll return with more details today friday

 

[jimoblak]

Are you using Acrobat 4 or 5 to view and print? V4 will do this. Download v5 reader or tinker with the export settings in ID.

 

[harolda]

If your printer is in an eps workflow, they need to embed all images, and set the transparancy flattener to maximum. This should solve most white box issues, as long as they are using a postscript level 3 rip.
As far as the pdf, it must be created with acrobat (distiller) 5, version 4 doesn't support transparancy.
Another workaround for your printer is to isolate all the problem graphics, eps them out of indesign and then rasterize in photoshop. It seems to hold all the transpancies and drop shadows.