Print Problems

malcineurope · Post by **malcineurope** » Tue Oct 01, 2019 9:17 pm

I tend to use a lot of colour and transparencies in my drawings, with the result that many clients have problems printing the drawings when saved to pdf. When this happens I normally advise that they "Print as an Image" and this often works. But not always. Has anyone else had this problem and, if so, how have you got over it? Is there another pdf based program to take it through which makes it easier to print?

Alfred Scott · Post by **Alfred Scott** » Tue Oct 01, 2019 10:13 pm

Malcolm,

I don’t think PDF supports or handles transparency at all.

Alfred

huc · Post by **huc** » Wed Oct 02, 2019 5:23 am

malcineurope wrote: ↑
Tue Oct 01, 2019 9:17 pm
I tend to use a lot of colour and transparencies in my drawings, with the result that many clients have problems printing the drawings when saved to pdf. When this happens I normally advise that they "Print as an Image" and this often works. But not always. Has anyone else had this problem and, if so, how have you got over it? Is there another pdf based program to take it through which makes it easier to print?

PDF supports transparency but there are complexities when going to print and in how the PDF is made. Generally a PDF that contains transparency wants to be flattened first [EDIT: a better term might be rasterized father than flattened]. To oversimplify - the flattening process basically creates an image which respects the transparency settings. Your "Print As An Image" recommendation is a solid one that is effectively doing just that. In short - it's doable - but there are variables including how the PDF was made and the printer driver and/or RIP if going to postscript devices, and the version of PDF being created. For example, not all versions of PDF support transparency with PDF 1.4 (the file format supported by Acrobat 5) was the first version of PDF that supported transparency.

the best summary I can recommend on the subject is this article from adobe https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/t ... t-pro.html and I hope that helps. This link is also worth reading created by Adobe but I couldn't find the link on their website so here's a copy I had and have uploaded http://www.huc.ca/downloads/Transparenc ... nGuide.pdf

I hope that helps... it's doable and once a workflow is established the results are consistent

Cheers
huc

malcineurope · Post by **malcineurope** » Wed Oct 02, 2019 10:25 am

Huc. Thank you. The referenced file was most informative. I then tried a little experiment. I tried printing a drawing to pdf from Powercadd, then printed to Preview and saved it. I then opened the drawing I had printed to pdf in Affinity and exported it as a pdf. The files for the drawing printed from within Powercadd and through Preview were the same. Both 1.4MB and Version 1.4 (presumably the pdf version they are using). Encoding software macOS Version 10.14.6 (Build 18G95) Quartz PDFContext. The one taken into and exported from Affinity was different. Only 1.1MB and Version 1.7. Encoding Software PDFlib+PDI 9.1.2p1-i (OS X/macOS).
However, I tried sending this to one of my contractors and they still could not print it getting a message that it flattens to 80% before coming to a halt.So any ideas as to how I can flatten it sufficiently for it to work on any large format printer before sending it out?