In Design CS5 exporting to PDF wonky

[Markus]

That's it! The overprint preview is not showing the objects !- I'm thinking that's a real rookie error! - looking at how to fix this now!

[Jeff Mauck]

You may want to also look in your raster settings in illustrator to see if honor spot colors is checked

[Markus]

Thanks all - but now that I know what the problem is - I'm not sure how to fix it - Is selecting a white and designating it as a spot the best solution

[Lukas Engqvist]

In illustrator you will find overprint in the Attributes pannel. May be there is a script to fix this automatically.

In a PDF you can fix it by building a preflight fix in Acrobat or pitsop or similar plugin.

Also it is possible in some rips to configure that you allways want knockout on non black colours, but this can mess up other transparency issues.

[Markus]

The problem was with the illustrator file after all. I opened the offending element in illustrator, selected FlattenTransparency in the object menu and unchecked "Preserve Overprints and spot colors" There is also an option to check a box to "Preserve Alpha Transparency" - Not sure whether I should check that also? I also cranked the Raster to Vectors slider to 100 on the vector side. I realize now that some of you were saying telling me exactly that, but I didn't know where the controls for it were . . . Thanks again for all your help!