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Unwanted rasterisation of layers when exporting vectors to pdf


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I have mentioned this before when exporting an infographic for printing (and I don't know if it has been covered  - so please excuse any unnecessary repetition). 

 

Below is an infographic I made at the weekend. It consists of numerous layers that are drawn on my iPad Pro and then organised/grouped on my Mac. 

I have discovered a number of times that Designer rasterises layers (presumably to cope with erase layers and various levels of complexity?). This means that when I go to a print bureau I have to export the file as a larger high res-jpeg to avoid rather artefacts. This is an unfortunate workaround. 

 

Any thoughts?

 

 

screenshot.png

better test export.pdf

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Hi Jason,
Would you be able to attach a copy of the afdesign file for your document please? Without this we cannot tell why things are getting rasterised.

However there are things that the PDF format cannot support so will have to be rasterised. The Erase Blend mode is indeed one of these - Layer Effects are also another area that will cause the objects to be rasterised.

The following Blend Modes should be usable in PDF:

  • Multiply
  • Screen
  • Overlay
  • Darken
  • Lighten
  • Colour Dodge
  • Colour Burn
  • Hard Light
  • Soft Light
  • Difference
  • Exclusion
  • Hue
  • Saturation
  • Colour
  • Luminosity

I would also suggest that if you're sending rasterised images to a printers, you will be better off with using either PNG or TIFF as they use lossless compression, unlike JPG which uses a lossy compression introducing artifacts depending on the compression level set.

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