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Bleed, Blending Modes & Text Rasterizing Weird Issues When Exporting as PDF


Raphie

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Affinity Publisher 1.10.4.1198 (Not Store Version) on Windows 10:

Processor    Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-9940X CPU @ 3.30GHz   3.31 GHz
Installed RAM    64.0 GB (63.7 GB usable)
System type    64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

Problem

When exporting document, bleeds are set same throughout the document. When exporting some pages are still cropped at page size. Same pages show as raster images instead as text and graphic.

I'm including the PDF document, can't use it for printing, is a complete mess and I couldn't find a way to fix this on the forum or even by searching for solutions. On the document notice page 13, 14, 27, 28, 31 and 32. Page 5 blending mode is not properly calculated for the PDF when bleed and crop marks are applied

What I have tried many times

  1. Check bleed for all pages not just the current page. Set it to specified size and applied it. This did not work.
  2. Have rasterized master elements as single flat rasterized object to see if any conflicting process is causing the issue. Did not work either.
  3. I have followed procedures for similar issues previously encountered with InDesing, for example, moving all text frames to the top layers this way they are not affected by graphic effects, forcing the text to be rasterized. This did not fix the issue either. And if it would fix the text rasterization issue this does not explain why the pages in question are being cropped at page size ignoring completely the "include bleed" request.
  4. Rasterized all images with live filter layers applied on Photo Persona, ex. Unsharp Mask. This did work with the rasterizing issue and the cropped to page size situation.

Solutions that worked

  1. Forced rasterized full pages: If you have applied effects on the Photo Persona and you do want to keep the original without destructively applied the filters, copy and paste the files to a Photo file and save it, then rasterize your image with filters.
  2. Blending mode issue: Same issue as with Photo Personal live filters, even if is a basic effect is applied, as Outer Shadow, the blending mode do not render properly.
  3. NOTE: I didn't rasterize all the images with effects in the document, only on the pages with the issues, there are images with effects in the other pages so not sure what cause the issue. My assumption is that mostly the Live Effects introduced on Photo might be causing some conflicts, but again that's speculation.

Conclusion

As many of you, I'm a multi-task agent where I work, graphic design is one of my many hats. But as a developer as well I would suggest to have any kind of prompt or process that alert the user or the PDF rendering engine:

  1. As a prompt: For users that use the Photo and Designer Persona frequently, when sending the document to export, prompt these users alerting those effects applied in different Personas can cause the pages to be completely rasterize to honor effects, then allowing the user to choose either to continue or to go back and raster all images with special filters.
  2. As a pre-export process: Prompt user that images with live filters and effects may affect how PDF is rendered, especially for legacy PDF-X formatting, and that the images will be temporarily rasterized with the effects but that the process will take longer and could cause memory issues. The process obviously will need to be prioritized over other running process. If this is even possible, since should be a temporary process that need to be reverted once the export is done.

Another suggestion is to add an option that forces to keep text readable instead of forcing the whole page to be rasterized, meaning, rasterizing anything that's not text and maintaining text integrity in a top layer over the rasterized background.

Attached File Descriptions

  1. The file with the flag OP (Offset Printing) is the one with all the issues.
  2. The file with the flag OP-Rasterized-Effects is the one with all the solutions applied

P17D673R1__US__EN__Head-Solutions-Brochure.OP.pdf P17D673R1__US__EN__Head-Solutions-Brochure.OP-Rasterized-Effects.pdf

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  • Staff

Thanks for your feedback, these are issues that have been logged with our developers to look into and improve the process or resolve the issue.

You can also try putting your adjustments and images in a group and exporting, this has worked for some workflows in the past.

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  • 1 year later...

Yes, what I did is to raster the groups with too many effects that are not supported by the PDF standards and that fix the issue. Downside is that I have to keep two copies of the same document. One with editable capabilities and one for processing the PDF. But that's way better workflow than the one I had before with Adobe products.

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