Hi All,
I just worked on some pizza boxes - major graphics and transparency involved. The illustrator files were 1.6 gig each and I couldn't even save them as eps. The problem is I needed to rip and trap them in Nexus and when I tried through pdf the transparency areas were all white boxes. I know I need to save them as PDF 1.4 or greater to NOT flatten, but I could not get them to work. It was suggested that I save out all the cts back to photoshop at the size there were needed and relink them to make a smaller file. Will merely saving them as EPS solve my transparency issues or is there more involved?
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated
thanks in advance
How big were the resulting PDF files? Did you try to save them as eps's from Acrobat? Most times if transparency is present saving as eps's will not give you what you expect because of flattening. Does your rip have a PDF trap engine?
Hi Almaink,
I'm using Nexus to trap the files and uses a Raster trap - does that help? The pdfs were about 500mb and I never thought to save them back out as eps... wouldn't I be compromising quality?
This is all very confusing to me.
Thanks for your help!
lynn
The "Raster" trap using Nexus is going to try to flatten the PDF, (unless you use Nexus Total Rip) so you might as well do the flattening in the native application and not let Nexus struggle with this. If you have a 1.4 PDF already, try to flatten this in Acrobat or like said: Save as a postscript first.
Hi T,
I'm not familiar with Nexus Total Rip but I will check into it. I tried flattening the Illust. file but turned all my blacks to cmyk and caused a few other funny looking things. Will try saving as PS and see how that works. Thanks for the suggestions, I really need the help.
This may or may not help your situation but we recently found pdf files that wouldn't work when trying to rip\trap them would work if we opened in Acrobat and optimized them first. Good luck.
Lynnz,
When you save the PDF from Illustrator, turn OFF "Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities" to reduce file size (leaving this option on saves the original Illustrator file within the PDF, and can result in much larger PDFs).
White boxes mean that transparent areas are interacting with spot color content. To correctly image this, you need to turn ON PostScript overprint on the RIP (assuming the content is intended to print as spot). If it's created as spot, but intended to print as process, convert all the spot colors to CMYK in the original Illustrator file and there should be no white boxes.
Hope this helps; keep us posted.
Hi cmccue,
I did remember to turn off "Preserve Illustrator..." before making the pdf. It was the only way to save the PDF small enough to work with. THe job prints CMYK and spot so I had to be careful. I'm not sure how to turn ON Postscript overprint in the RIP, but I'll do some looking. Unfortunately this time around I ran out of options on my own and had to outsource the job - the only consolation is to find out that they are struggling with it too. I really need to know how to better handle these situations in the future.
Thanks for your help I really appreciate it.
lynn
Looks like you need to ask your boss to add Nexus PDF Processor so that you don't need flatten your PDF and keep the transparency PDF all the way from PDF Trapper to RIP to 1 bit tiff file. You can blame Adobe because they are pushing people to use PDF with all kind of transparency effects and throw away the postscript format.
Transparency Issues
Linear Mode
