PDFx1a transparency-flattener not good, CMYK preview lacking

[Peter Maas]

It is not for me to say what kind of PDF my printer wants. Many of them still ask for PDFx1a, which is flattened. When I compare the flattener of Publisher with InDesign, it really falls short. And it seems like this problem has been noted two years ago and still isn't solved.

1. Transparent objects are converted into pixels – or get deleted when I choose to rasterise nothing (why would I even do that?). That means that text with transparent objects on top of it is converted to something that is not vector anymore.
2. Pantone elements with transparency are converted to CMYK. That means a serious limitation in terms of design possibilities. InDesign converts them to elements with overprint applied. I don't see Publisher doing that. 
3. The flattener has no option in using resolution higher than 400dpi. Unless I set the document-dpi at a higher value. When you print the design, you would really see the difference in the readability of text. That's why we always advise never to make a book in Photoshop.
4. Glad to see that you're using masks nowadays, to make sure that there's a crisp outline on rasterised elements. Please also consider what is inside the rasterised elements.
5. I would like to see the preview of my separations before I make the PDF. Up till now I've seen Publisher convert my Pantone Illustrator ai-files to CMYK without any warning. And I don't like those surprises. When my customers would have transparency applied to Pantone-objects it would be nice to see in advance what the print would be like. Now black text in an illustration is converted to cmyk black.
6. Publisher lacks an overprint preview. To have this means that you can understand fully what kind of print you will get. Now it drives me crazy because of this .ai-file I have where all of its colors are converted to different cmyk.

Any idea when these problems and wishes are going to be resolved?

[thomaso]

On 3/7/2022 at 6:41 PM, Peter Maas said:

Any idea when these problems and wishes are going to be resolved?

• Transparency: Affinity exports PDF/X-1a in its 2003 flavour, based on PDF 1.4, which generally allows transparency, but transparency should not be used in X-1 (as it was not available for the 2001 X-1a predecessor).

• Spot Colours: They do get exported by Affinity in PDF X/1-a. It might need further info about your colour definition, spot name and export setting to detect what prevents them from occurring in your export. Compare this sample export: v1104 pdf:x-1a_2003.pdf

• Wishes: since this is the bugs forum you might want to place your wishes in an appropriate Feature Request forum, where possibly your wishes exist already, enabling you just to add your vote to the according threads. In case you create a new topic you better avoid to mix various wishes to prevent the single wishes from being ignored, confused or overseen.

[Peter Maas]

14 hours ago, thomaso said:

• Transparency: Affinity exports PDF/X-1a in its 2003 flavour, based on PDF 1.4, which generally allows transparency, but transparency should not be used in X-1 (as it was not available for the 2001 X-1a predecessor).

• Spot Colours: They do get exported by Affinity in PDF X/1-a. It might need further info about your colour definition, spot name and export setting to detect what prevents them from occurring in your export. Compare this sample export: v1104 pdf:x-1a_2003.pdf

• Wishes: since this is the bugs forum you might want to place your wishes in an appropriate Feature Request forum, where possibly your wishes exist already, enabling you just to add your vote to the according threads. In case you create a new topic you better avoid to mix various wishes to prevent the single wishes from being ignored, confused or overseen.

?? I can't get it to work. What do I miss? I can make use of opacity, or blend mode, but always my transparent Pantone elements are rasterised in PDFx1a and thereby converted to CMYK bitmaps. My document setting is CMYK 8bits. I use the blend mode and opacity in the layers panel and tried the opacity in the fill panel as well. (Why is there even a difference in the two transparency options?) I use the default PDFx1a option and tried variations as well, but to no success.

First attempts never gave me the resolution I asked for unless I changed the document resolution as well. Now it does behave the way it should. No idea what made that change.                                                                                                                                      

[thomaso]

3 hours ago, Peter Maas said:

I can make use of opacity, or blend mode, but always my transparent Pantone elements are rasterised in PDFx1a and thereby converted to CMYK bitmaps.

Unfortunately I don't know, possibly caused by color settings, e.g. swatch definitions, profiles, or export.

Can you export this sample v1104 spot colors for X-1a export.afpub with unrasterized spot colors?

Or upload your custom sample .afpub, containing two objects with two overlapping spot colored vector objects with the upper layer set to 50% transparent.

[Peter Maas]

8 hours ago, thomaso said:

Unfortunately I don't know, possibly caused by color settings, e.g. swatch definitions, profiles, or export.

Can you export this sample v1104 spot colors for X-1a export.afpub with unrasterized spot colors?

Or upload your custom sample .afpub, containing two objects with two overlappingspot colored vector objects with the upper layer set to 50% transparent.

Thanks a lot, that gives me the suggestion that I am missing something. But I still don't know what. When I output your file as pdfx1a the result is as your screenshot shows. But A: I don't know how/where you set the transparency like you did in this file, and B: how come I don't see it in the design? and C_ this is not transparency but overprint. Still I have no idea where to set overprint as a property and how to make it visible in Publisher.

Transparency would be like playing with opacity. Or blend mode. Overprint has a limitation in mixing colours when the top object has a percentage of colour that is also being used in the bottom object. 

[thomaso]

[Peter Maas]

17 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Thanks Thomas (?) That is overprint indeed. It is applied like the way Quark XPress did it for years. But again: that is not the same as transparency, and really a miss that it is not visible. This is to be applied for varnishes for example, or a cutting line. Nice to know that it's there, though.

[Callum]

Hi @Peter Maas,

In regards to your Pantone colours with transparency being converted to CMYK I'd imagine its because the Pantone Colours you are using aren't Spot colours you can check this by selecting an object with the Pantone colour applied and viewing the colour panel. If you export to PDF 1.4 it should work around these issues.

[Peter Maas]

On 3/11/2022 at 5:12 PM, Callum said:

Hi @Peter Maas,

In regards to your Pantone colours with transparency being converted to CMYK I'd imagine its because the Pantone Colours you are using aren't Spot colours you can check this by selecting an object with the Pantone colour applied and viewing the colour panel. If you export to PDF 1.4 it should work around these issues.

Hi Callum, thanks for your reply. I understand that when exporting to pdfx4 there will be no issues with flattening transparency since flattening is not needed and not happening. But when I compare the flattener of Publisher to InDesign, Publisher is really terrible. I will upload the Publisher document here. Show me a PDFx1a with only pantone Colors. If I do the exact same in InDesign (and have the overprint preview active to check what I can expect in print) I get exact similar output, with only pantone. If Publisher will not be improved I would advise people to work with it only if they are sure that PDFx4 is okay to upload to their printer. If PDFx1a is still the format to work with, I would recommend InDesign. I hope you can convince me otherwise.

abc transparantie pantone.afpub pantone transp indesign pdfx1a.pdf