Uneven spacing between Japanese Dots on table strokes!!! 1

[JohnCitizen]

Argh....this is baffling me!

For my table styles I have used the Japanese Dots stroke option. When I zoom in on the dotted strokes, it appears to have even spacing between all dots....

...however...


...when I zoom out there appears to be a slight glitch in the spacing, where the edge of each cell would meet. At first I thought this just might be a by-product of how ID renders text and strokes when zoomed out, but after printing a few samples, I can see that the point at which the cells meet along the length of each stroke either has a slightly larger gap...or has two dots that are too close together.

Grrr...

I guess the issue is that ID is considering the spacing of the Japanese Dots for EACH CELL, rather than looking at the width of all columns combined and working out an even spacing based upon that width.

In Illustrator I could work around this problem - anyone know what the trick is to fix this in ID?

 

[apepp]

...version of indesign?

...and also, can you post a link to a screen shot so we can all see and get a better idea of what your issue might be?

andrew

 

[JohnCitizen]

CS3

Like I said, the issue is most visible in the printing, moreso than the screen....and if it is visible on screen, it is only so when zoomed out siginificantly.

When zoomed in, the dots are evenly spaced....hence...I'm baffled!

 

[JohnCitizen]

Link to image (screen grab)

http://yfrog.com/3dpicture1fkkp

 

[JohnCitizen]

(screen grab)

Can you see where the purple dots are bunching up where each cell meets on the horizontal axis?

 

[blueark]

I see what you mean, and was able to replicate it here. I did a few experiments with creating a custom stroke style, and trying out other dotted styles, but unfortunately to no avail. It looks like dotted styles on table cells are misaligned slightly.

The only workaround I could find was to manually draw lines between each row, and use 'Distribute Spacing' to even them out. Less than ideal, and hopefully someone else has a better idea.

 

[apepp]

...just to be back in the mix here...

...i cannot replicate a problem with printing Japanese dots on an inkject printer...

...sure, the onscreen render looks off at certain magnifications (in PDF too), but have aways disregarded that and never had a problem printing to high end CTP printing devices or my own desktop inkjet printer...

...i'm not convinced this is a global issue for every indesign user, so something else is happening which either points to your printer or print setup...

...are you printing to laser printers?

...have you tried exporting to PDF, and printing from Acrobat instead?

...have you tried "print as image" turned off and turned on?

...are you bang up to date with your printer drivers and also InDesign CS3?

...what happens when you copy the table, paste into illustrator, save to ai (PDF), place in indesign and print?

andrew

 

[blueark]

My own laser printer drivers are up to date, and so is CS3, but admittedly, I haven't used Japanese dots on a table before, so it's not something I would have noticed previously. Exporting to PDF works just fine though, so it's undoubtedly a problem at the print side rather than InDesign as you suggested.

 

[JohnCitizen]

Thanks for that - I'll run some tests tomorrow...

...but on the sound of it, it looks lie it is simply the way our crappy laser printer is interpreting the dots.

Cheers!