Quark 8.1 native transparency in PDF export?!

[disbellj]

QuarkXPress 8 - What's New

Am I seeing things or did Quark actually make the right move?

Don

[almaink]

More like they are moving in the right direction now. Quark is still postscript based and most likely always will be. But at least now they are using PDFmarks and thats better than flattening. I don't think they will ever have support for imported transparency tho.

[disbellj]

almaink,

You're right. Until Quark can pass through placed transparency into the PDF, they aren't there yet. But they are finally moving in the right direction. Also, it doesn't look like there a blend modes because, as you said, and the video says, this is still PostScript.

Wonder why Quark doesn't just move to PDF? Adobe gave it to ISO. It's ISO now.

Regards,

Don

[Joe]

I had a job that was 68 pages exported from Quark with live transparency. Came in at a hefty 3.2 gigabyte PDF. Customer FTP'd it to us over their not so fast connection. Took 16 hours to transmit.

[disbellj]

DANG JOE!

That sucks!

I remember when I first used PDF export from Quark, I noticed this also.

This is why I choose to let Quark output it's huge PostScript, and then I distill in Distiller to PDF. The setting I changed in Distiller advanced joboption settings is I UNCHECKED 'Allow PostScript file to override Adobe PDF Setings'. This way, I get a PDF the same size Adobe would make it, with the compression and downsampling Adobe uses. It would be nice to know how much bigger one of Quark's new PDFs are: comparing PDF export from Quark to PS from Quark and letting Adobe distill to PDF.

Regards,

Don

[Shawn]

Hi Joe

The Quark "Default PDF Output Style" settings will apply no compression to images, which leads to incredibly huge files. I bet your customer chose that option or settings based on that option.

In general live transparency should make for much smaller file sizes, since it's a much more efficient way to represent the data.

Our workflow is similar to what Don mentioned. I've got the Quark Prefs set to export to Postscript (with the Native Transparency option checked). Then I run them through Disitiller to make the PDF. It makes nice, compact,clean, rippable files. The only issue with this method is that you need to hand edit the Distiller .joboptions file to make it honor the transparency. It's not a big deal, just change the line that reads "/AllowTransparency false" to "/AllowTransparency true" in a text editor. This setting won't affect any other files that aren't using the PDFMark tags so it's safe to apply it to your general PDF settings.

Shawn

[Joe]

I suppose that is the settings they used. It was difficult enough enough just to get them to make a PDF.

About the "/AllowTransparency false" to "/AllowTransparency true" comment...wouldn't it already be flattened when creating the PS file before it ever gets to distiller?

[Shawn]

Originally Posted by Joe

About the "/AllowTransparency false" to "/AllowTransparency true" comment...wouldn't it already be flattened when creating the PS file before it ever gets to distiller?

Hi Joe

Nope, the transparency can remain live. It only works if you export to .ps like I mentioned and choose to export transparency natively in the PDF export settings. It won't work if you print to .ps using the print dialog.

In 8.1 Quark basically provides a tag around the transparent elements in the .ps stream that passes the information directly to Distiller. If you edit the joboptions like I mentioned, Distiller 6 and later will keep the live transparency when converting to PDF. I've been using it since Quark 8.1 came out and it's helped to avoid all sorts of flattening artifacts.

Shawn

[Joe]

Originally Posted by Shawn

Hi Joe

Nope, the transparency can remain live. It only works if you export to .ps like I mentioned and choose to export transparency natively in the PDF export settings. It won't work if you print to .ps using the print dialog.

In 8.1 Quark basically provides a tag around the transparent elements in the .ps stream that passes the information directly to Distiller. If you edit the joboptions like I mentioned, Distiller 6 and later will keep the live transparency when converting to PDF. I've been using it since Quark 8.1 came out and it's helped to avoid all sorts of flattening artifacts.

Shawn

Great info. Thanks. I learned something new today.

[disbellj]

Shawn,

Thanks for the info. Do you use PDF/X-4 in Distiller, or a custom PDF joboptions? If so, which default joboptions was it based on?

Thanks,

Don