Jagged Text Outline Punk and Bloat style

[Glenn McDowall]

I have a PDF (according to its properties its created by Distiller 9.0.0 from QuarkXPress pictwpstops filter 1.0) of an outer cover it has the wrong spine size so I'd usually place this 3 times in InDesign and create a new one with the correct size spine.

1st question: What looks like text in the PDF has been turned to outline but has also been split into horizontal slices, has anyone seen this before or know why it happens?

2nd question: In the Final PDF Exported out of InDesign (tried CS4 and 5.5) these shapes corrupt giving a ragged appearance. Is there anything I can do to stop this?

Here is a before and after screen-captures of the PDF in wire frame mode the size of the letters is about 8pt.

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[Lukas Engqvist]

Ouch the jaggies as you call them is a rounding off or what is called "flatness" which has to do with how curves are simplified to "appropriate" size straight segments (flatness is usually linked to output resolution). The dividing into segments may be caused by clipping paths having too many points and therefore needing to be split into smaller regions.

I don't know how to solve the problem, one work around would be to try save the PDF from acrobat to an EPS then place it in InDesign. The refrying is an attempt to by-pass where the flatness code is embedded. Let me know how it goes. (If it doesn't work I would almost need to play with the file to figure out how to trumph the rouge setting)

 

[rich apollo]

Yes, I've seen this behavior before. Can you post a composite image?

 

[Glenn McDowall]

Lukas has suggested its a clipping path that has been split due to the number of points, I'm thinking that a whole paragraph of text converted to outline is a sort of compound path with many many points and somewhere an application is deciding to simplify this by splitting it into horizontal strips. If I try to use Pitstop's Selection Arrow I get a piece of the letter highlighted in Blue and the rest of the strip in Yellow or Gold.
Before Pitstop reports Smoothness as 0.02 and After as Default, Flatness reamains the same at 1.00.

Anyway here is a composite.

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

It looks almost as if there is some "snap to point" going on. The latest picture shows clearly that it's not flatness, there are still curves but both anchor points and handles seem to move at random…*must be some kind of floating point error (rounding of, or snapping to grid)

 

[DCurry]

Kinda reminds me of what happens when you save a file as WMF.

 

[rich apollo]

Kinda reminds me of what happens when you save a file as WMF.

Exactly!

The composite image doesn't show what I expected. Do you have the original files? Is this text in the original? Are there transparency effects going on? Are each of the "slices" clipping paths, or just paths filled with a color?

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

I looked at the files. They are very strange. This is nothing I seen before. The closest to this is actually PDFs from (forgive me for mentioning in this forum) MS Publisher.
Text is split into huge over dimensioned objects that have just thin strips of text. Editing using Illustrator touch up reveals that one such object becomes minute. In Illustrator I need to zoom in to 6400% and can still not read the text. There are serious scaling issues in this…*which supports the previous floating point/rounding off theory.
Opening the file in Illustrator seems to be much safer for this project, but the structure is absurd. characters has bands of compound paths (up to five bands per text) In illustrator allready the gaps between these lines are apparent. Opacity is normal (note the creator in the PDF is set to distiller 9.0 so we are looking at something that has been created via PostScript), but would be interesting to know if it uses some other transparency blending. The slices are NOT clipping paths (as what happens in Photoshop transparency). The background is just one big image, which is also wierd. There is text on other patrs of the page that is real text, so the workflow supports real text.

 

[Glenn McDowall]

I've been out for a bit but today have been in touch with the designer and got hold of the native files, it turns out the split text file is a Freehand MX EPS, open the EPS in FreehandMX and its magically back as text shapes, open the EPS with Illy or Distill and you have the long strips.

I'm still at a loss as to why downstream it corrupts so badly out of InDesign, I've tried placing the EPS directly into InDesign and tried making a pdf from quark 8 and placed that too into InDesign but neither corrupt when Exported to PDF. If I get more free time I'll try using Quark 6.5 here and see if I can get the same results as the designer (who created the PDF by printing Postscript from Quark 6.5 then Distiller9 (the PPD was PowerRIP-X for Epson Stylus 1290 could that have any influence?)).