Unwanted lines appearing only on print-out

[Olly Wright]

Hello, new to Affinity Designer here. I'm very happy with the software so far.

I have however encountered what appears to be a bug. Unwanted lines are appearing in a very specific way. The lines are not present on screen, but when printing out I'm getting a fine white highlight on the top edges and a dark line along the bottom edges. 

The layer that is doing this is a simple black fill with the layer opacity set to 8%.

Does anyone have any ideas how to prevent this?

Thanks.

[Sean P]

Hi Olly,

Would you be willing to upload a sample afdesign file to our Internal Dropbox using the link below please so we can get this investigated?

Thanks!
https://www.dropbox.com/request/Yn9iC9iCOaHDUv88PcbK

 

[Olly Wright]

Sure thing. The shared file is called Korvosoa keep_1st Floor. Shared it to your dropbox.

The issue is happening with all the shapes on the layer called 'Floor shader'. 

thanks!

Edited January 13, 2020 by Olly Wright

[Sean P]

Thanks for the file! Interestingly I'm not really getting that much of a line with that shading on the floor, however I am seeing a lot of noticeable boxes between objects. I believe this could be happening when the Filter Effects layers are rasterised when being sent to the printer.

On Windows the Print dialog has an option to 'Rasterise' the entire page on print to avoid print issues such as these. Unfortunately the Mac Print dialog cannot offer this option so it has to be done manually. If you select all your layers and then group them, you should be able to temporarily Rasterise that group and send the file to the printer. This should allow you to work around the print issues. Although don't forget to undo the Rasterise after you've printed!

In the meantime I'll pass it on to development to see if anything can be done to avoid these issues.

[Olly Wright]

Thanks for the prompt feedback, I'll give temporarily rasterising the layer a try!

Do you happen to know how this will work with an exported pdf, if at all? The file is a gaming map that i want to share in pdf format, so others can use it. Meaning I won't be able to remotely manage their print settings, it'll be up to them. The target print output is A0, so rasterising elements is suboptimal from a file size and quality point of view.

Out of curiosity, what were the boxes you noticed between objects? Do you know if i can replicate  those, or what to look out for? Is there anything I can do to the file to minimise these kind of print artefacts? I confess I've just focussed on drawing it, not how it will print, so far.

Thanks for passing this to the devs too. 

[Sean P]

Here is the effect. The first two images are from Printing out of Affinity, and the third is printing from a PDF Export using Acrobat.

PDF Export Print:

I've done some poking about and it does seem to be a transparency such as this can be a common issue for the Home/Office type of printer. See this post for a user reporting a similar issue when printing from InDesign:
https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/64504/pdf-from-indesign-looks-correct-but-prints-bounding-boxes-around-effects-and-tra

Using the PDF Flatten preset with your file gives a filesize of around 7mb, which I personally doesn't feel is too bad for a A0 raster image at 300dpi. It might be worth sharing both formats to give users a choice?

If you wish for me to remove these images after you've seen them, let me know and I shall!

[Olly Wright]

Thanks again for looking at it. I'll try it on a higher end printer in a local print shop and see how their drivers handle it... it certainly does seem like it could be a printer / driver issue.

I'll also try the flatten preset and see how it goes. As long as I can distribute the file itself vector but also with some instructions for the receiver(s) to get the right print results it'll be fine.

I'll also look at how I can potentially adapt the file to reduce the likelyhood of this kind of issue.

I'll post here if it discover anything more.

No need to take the images down - they might proove useful to others.

 

[Sean P]

Wonderful! Thanks for letting me know! 

[Olly Wright]

Working on the next floor (of the map) I tried constructing it by having all the shade areas 100% black, and then putting the overall layer opacity at 8%. Previously the layer was 100% and each curve had its own custom opacity.

The unwanted emboss-like effect is still showing up, but it's less obvious. So that's an improvement, although it's also interesting that the bug replicates at all - its a new drawing with new assets.

 

 

[Olly Wright]

Finally tested it on a Cann PRO-4000S at A0. Printed out perfectly! So it is an artefact of the A3 colour lasers I was using to test it on earlier. Thank you for your help.

 

 

 

[Sean P]

Thank you very much for letting me know! Glad it's printed out perfectly - printers can be a bit of a nightmare at times. Enjoy your games and lovely painted miniatures too (from a WH40K player)!

[Olly Wright]

Haha thanks. I figured with painted minis I wanted to try some large scale maps to go with them. Affinity Designer is perfect for that, and I've not really tried the pixel brushes within the curves feature yet, which will take it another step. 

[Marcelo Corneieles]

Same thing is hapening to me on affinity designer ver 1.8.3.641

 

here you have a picture attached of a printed page.. the design didn't show those lines, or were designed.