Yet another InDesign Spot Color / Transparency problem

[PaulK]

I've got a customer who sent me a InDesignCS2 file that is Black & Pantone 158 U.

They have used Transparencies over the spot color and when I distill and open my PDF there are white boxes over the spot color where the transparency is.

Is there any way around this? They want a Black & Pantone 158 U proof and the file has to be sent to our Apogee X RIP for print as a two color job.

Help! :cry:

[Cory]

have your turned on your overprint preview in acrobat?

[born2print]

That'll do it!

[jimking]

Do you have the complete ApogeeX workflow. If so print to Apogee and let Apogee normalize and create the pdf and see what you get.

[Joe]

I love it when a designer makes a spot color and then adds another color over the top of it like a tint of black, thereby no long making the spot color relevant. I guess they can't figure out how to pick a spot color that is a little darker than the first one they picked. I'm getting a lot of these kinds of ads in lately.

[beermonster]

yea we get thet too - and the press will regularly say - can we colour match that and print it as a solid - as opposed to 2 (or more) colours....then i have to think for a living and make it happen - which usually hurts

i dont "get" designers doing that either - then again we are packaging and we have the flexibility to change stuff but i bet those of you that dont and have to go with it have issues keeping consistent colour sometimes - its a pain huh

we work with overprint preview almost always on - in illy, indy and acrobat (sigh - but not quark) and it's invaluable - until one day, after printing these cartons many many times, the customer casually asked "where's that white line of text"

"what white text" i asked.......only to find white text set to overprint - which we couldnt see as we were viewing in overprint mode ops:

they were very good about it, conceeding it was set up wrong and all proofs were signed off and press passes done - we conceeded we should have spotted it - so somewhere in your "workflow" make some provision for checking for "white overprints"

[Joe]

Originally Posted by beermonster

we work with overprint preview almost always on - in illy, indy and acrobat (sigh - but not quark) and it's invaluable - until one day, after printing these cartons many many times, the customer casually asked "where's that white line of text"

"what white text" i asked.......only to find white text set to overprint - which we couldnt see as we were viewing in overprint mode ops:

they were very good about it, conceeding it was set up wrong and all proofs were signed off and press passes done - we conceeded we should have spotted it - so somewhere in your "workflow" make some provision for checking for "white overprints"

I've had the same issue with white text set to overprint since I always keep overprint preview turned on. The bad part is that the customer will print to a laser printer and the text will be knocked out and then you have to explain the difference between their $150 laser printer and our megabucks workflow.

Just an FYI, but with Pitstop you can do the "Knockout White" function in global change under the Prepress tab and I think you could also set up an action list or a profile to do this. Pitstop Server could accomplish this also and I know Odystar has that functionality also.

[/hijack thread]

[apepp]

...another classic scenario is (as it has happened to our studio boss), a PDF (or Pretty Damn Frenetic) job was sent via email "MUST BE PRINTED TONIGHT!!!" sort of affair...

...happily imposing this file he replied with a ripped and imposed pdf file for the client to check, the boss viewing with overprint ON in acrobat and the client viewing the pdf in a free reader, no overprint preview option there...

...viewing the artwork in Quark 7, no white artwork visible as this was an imported eps file, set to overpint in illustrator...

...the designer had changed a black overprinting object to white, with very little warning of this he proceeded to place this file into Quark 7...

...printed and folded to 6 page 250,000 copies with this intricate white background missing...

...a real sickener...

:cry:

...from the bosses point of view it was the designers fault, clear and simple, the arrogance was amazing...

...God only knows what he'd have said if it was anyone else in the studio...

...he'd have looked at us very much like this: :twisted:

...mind you, he looks like this anyway...

[Joe]

Originally Posted by apepp

the client viewing the pdf in a free reader, no overprint preview option there

Acrobat Reader has overprint preview but I think it is off by default. You turn it on in the preferences.

[PaulK]

Yes, when I turn Overprint Preview on in Acrobat 6, everything looks fine. But when we drop the pdf into the Apogee hot folder for ripping, the white boxes still appear and the spot color background underneath the transparent drop shadow is lost.