Justin de Kruyf
Member
I'm attempting to find the best way to deal with transparency issues when sending to our Xerox 700 and C75 digital printers. Scouring the internet has turned up hundreds of others having similar issues and given me one working solution but it's not a particularly good one.
For those not familiar with the problem, when I send files containing transparency or transparency-reliant effects like drop shadows, especially when there is a mix of vector and raster imagery overlapping, our machines will print a large bounding box of inconsistent colour around all of the oftending graphic elements. This was once referred to as Yucky Discoloured Box Syndrome by a writer on InDesign Secrets.
We send our files directly to our Xerox 700 and C75 through InDesign's print dialogue. There it's processed by the Fiery FS100s attached to each machine.
The only reliable workaround for the transparency problem that I've found so far is to create a new Transparency Flattener Preset which rasterizes the entire job at the native resolution of our printers as it is sent over. This presents two main problems:
(1) It takes a very long time for my machine to process these files, and I've got the newest computer in our shop. The resulting files as they arrive in our print queue, depending on the complexity, can be as much as ten times as large as they would have otherwise been with all of the vectors intact and the rasters sent out at 600dpi. Where jobs that don't have this issue can be sent to our printers generally within 10-20 seconds, complex jobs that require flattening can sometimes take over an hour to send. This usually results in problem 2…
(2) Our computers run out of RAM before the file is able to be successfully sent to the printer. As the job progresses I bring up Activity Monitor and close every other application besides InDesign to free up as much available RAM as I can. I watch the free memory dwindle and it often gets me down to about 20mb of available ram with the job just barely making it through. Complex jobs fail every time and need to be broken down into sections small enough to clear without exhausting my memory. The iMac I'm running only came with 4gb ram and once I've got a job running in InDesign I'm down to only about 1.4gb available, so I recognize that bumping this machine up to 8gb is probably the first step if I'm going to continue rasterizing jobs.
I've tried lots of other options. In Command Workstation I've experimented with the "Optimize RGB Transparency" and "Composite Overprint" settings. Some users said that changing the printer screen mode has solved their problems, but I've experimented through the whole available range with no improvement and, besides that, there are only two screen modes that we really want to use for desirable print quality and only one of those screen modes will accurately match our press results with the colour profile I maintain.
I've also tried exporting a PDF and transferring that to our printer via Command Workstation rather than sending the job through InDesign's print dialogue. I found one user recommending that troublesome jobs be exported as PDF/X-4 as this version was supposed to place particular emphasis on the handling of transparency. In all situations this failed to have any effect and the bounding boxes printed the same.
It seems ridiculous to me that modern digital printing systems would actually have this much trouble with transparencies. Every other job I run contains drop shadows, and there's no reason that our in-house designs should prefer vector shadows over raster drop-shadows just to make our printing easier. There's probably just a solution out there that I haven't been able to find.
For those not familiar with the problem, when I send files containing transparency or transparency-reliant effects like drop shadows, especially when there is a mix of vector and raster imagery overlapping, our machines will print a large bounding box of inconsistent colour around all of the oftending graphic elements. This was once referred to as Yucky Discoloured Box Syndrome by a writer on InDesign Secrets.
We send our files directly to our Xerox 700 and C75 through InDesign's print dialogue. There it's processed by the Fiery FS100s attached to each machine.
The only reliable workaround for the transparency problem that I've found so far is to create a new Transparency Flattener Preset which rasterizes the entire job at the native resolution of our printers as it is sent over. This presents two main problems:
(1) It takes a very long time for my machine to process these files, and I've got the newest computer in our shop. The resulting files as they arrive in our print queue, depending on the complexity, can be as much as ten times as large as they would have otherwise been with all of the vectors intact and the rasters sent out at 600dpi. Where jobs that don't have this issue can be sent to our printers generally within 10-20 seconds, complex jobs that require flattening can sometimes take over an hour to send. This usually results in problem 2…
(2) Our computers run out of RAM before the file is able to be successfully sent to the printer. As the job progresses I bring up Activity Monitor and close every other application besides InDesign to free up as much available RAM as I can. I watch the free memory dwindle and it often gets me down to about 20mb of available ram with the job just barely making it through. Complex jobs fail every time and need to be broken down into sections small enough to clear without exhausting my memory. The iMac I'm running only came with 4gb ram and once I've got a job running in InDesign I'm down to only about 1.4gb available, so I recognize that bumping this machine up to 8gb is probably the first step if I'm going to continue rasterizing jobs.
I've tried lots of other options. In Command Workstation I've experimented with the "Optimize RGB Transparency" and "Composite Overprint" settings. Some users said that changing the printer screen mode has solved their problems, but I've experimented through the whole available range with no improvement and, besides that, there are only two screen modes that we really want to use for desirable print quality and only one of those screen modes will accurately match our press results with the colour profile I maintain.
I've also tried exporting a PDF and transferring that to our printer via Command Workstation rather than sending the job through InDesign's print dialogue. I found one user recommending that troublesome jobs be exported as PDF/X-4 as this version was supposed to place particular emphasis on the handling of transparency. In all situations this failed to have any effect and the bounding boxes printed the same.
It seems ridiculous to me that modern digital printing systems would actually have this much trouble with transparencies. Every other job I run contains drop shadows, and there's no reason that our in-house designs should prefer vector shadows over raster drop-shadows just to make our printing easier. There's probably just a solution out there that I haven't been able to find.
