Grayscale Mode K text on white or on a fill not the same thickness. Versant engine

[DYP]

This rears its ugly head every now and then. Had a customer complain about it today again. I see it in grayscale mode a lot but this job was color but with black only elements set to CMYK gray prints a black only. Rows of description and pricing alternating between 20% and 0% fill. Black text looks like it is bold on the 20% fill and regular on the 0% fill. With CMYK gray prints a black only turned off it does not do this. Raster view in ImageViewer does not show any difference, so it is something with the engine. I can find some settings like setting Text/graphics quality to normal or different screens will make it less noticeable but nothing RIP setting wise seems to totally eliminates it.. Or course if you use 1% fill in the white row the text looks the same other than the optical illusion you get which I can confirm looking at it through a loupe. It is almost like because of this optical illusion someone decided to program the print engine to choke the text on fills but made a mistake and spread it instead. And by the way Trapping on or off makes no difference. APPE on or off makes no difference.

Maybe I am overlooking a setting that is causing this? has anyone figured settings that will not cause this to happen?

I had time today and took this issue to second level. It will be interesting what they come back with. I also have my tech looking into this. Engine setting, NVM setting somewhere maybe?

 

[SoggyWinter]

Do you get the same results if you rasterize the PDFs first (ie, convert to TIFs, then PDF and convert the TIFs)?

 

[DYP]

Have you seen a difference if you do it that way?

 

[DYP]

Interesting that the rasterized pdfs do not show that. But rasterizing multiple page PDFs is not practically. But why is it doing this with vector elements in PDF files?

 

[ColorMonkey]

DYP I think I know what your talking about but not 100% sure. I had a similar problem on another machine we used to have.

If you find a file that you would be able to post, do that. If you are able to state the affected type you are seeing these effects. I just want to check it out and see what is going on with the file to see if I can see anything.

BTW do you have Pitstop?

And am I correct that you are taking a PDF file and dropping it into the HOLD queue, setting the Color Mode to Greyscale and the output shows these results you are referring to?