Unwanted dashed "shadow" lines around pasted JPGs in Publisher

[wearyplodder]

I wanted to reproduce some pages from an old magazine, held as a PDF, as a booklet.  I produced JPGs using "Take a snapshot" in Acrobat Pro, and pasted these into a booklet in Publisher.

All looked good on-screen, but when printed out there is a dashed "shadow" line along the top and left edges of most, but not all, of the JPGs.

I previously had the same issue in PagePlus, but found that cropping the two offending edges a little resolved the problem; however in Publisher it just moves the lines in to the new cropped edges.

Has anyone else seen this problem, and can anyone suggest how to resolve it, please

[AndyWh]

This may not be the cause of the issue you see, but it is possible to create a border to an image. The screenshot below shows a pasted JPEG that has a setting for the stroke. With the picture selected the stroke properties are displayed and can be edited. The clone of the image at the right shows the effect of the stroke when no obscured by the selection cursor.

If this is the cause, not sure why it happens on some of your images and not on others.

 

[Paul Mc]

I've had a similar problem with scanned images (via Photoshop). It happened because the images needed rotating for the lines of text to be horizontal as the scans were a little skewed. The rotation seemed to have added extra columns and rows of pixels around the border in PS. Because some of them were anti aliased they appeared as semi-transparent over the black background I had. The dashed effect was due to the skew correction. None of this was caused by Affinity apps but they allowed me to correct the problem.

 

[wearyplodder]

Thanks for taking the trouble to look at this.  I checked and Stroke is set to None; and in any case, in your example the dashes are clearly seen on screen, whereas mine do not appear until the page is printed.  My attached example is a photo of the printout.

[wearyplodder]

Thank you Paul Mc.  This looks hopeful as I have applied slight rotations.  So how exactly did you get round it? (I'm not an experienced user.)

[Paul Mc]

In one case I cropped it just as you say you did earlier, in all the other cases I placed a white rectangle behind it and then rasterised the result - this allowed me to enlarge the canvas a little which helped with my requirement.

[Paul Mc]

Further to my answer, if the dark spots are due to dark pixels then only cropping will apply (unless you want to paint them out using the brush or maybe a white rectangle stroke with a clear fill). In my case the dark dashes were due to transparent pixels and putting the white rectangle behind them made them match the white paper so were then invisible so the eye.

[wearyplodder]

Paul, just very quickly as I have to go out.  I tried a rectagular box with a white fill over where I guessed the dashes to be and it removed them, so thank you very much for that.  It would be a tedious process in a large book - thankfully mine has just 20 pages.

[Paul Mc]

If you try a rectangle over the whole area so that the edges of the rectangle align closely with the dashes and then use a clear/transparent fill but a white stroke colour and then on the stroke tab give the stroke a non-zero thickness. Maybe use a bright colour to start with and then switch to white once you can see where the edges are and it is in the correct place.

[wearyplodder]

Paul, with a little more time to experiment I have followed your suggestion and it succesfully removed the dashes, thank you, but it seems strange that all this is necessary.  It doesn't help that when I select the rectangle tool the outline of the JPG disappears, so I am left guessing where to draw the rectangle, complicated by the fact, as I have said before, that the dashes that I am trying to remove are never visible on-screen; they only show up on a printed hardcopy.  For years I have been using Microsoft Publisher 2003 and never seen this issue.

[Paul Mc]

Maybe if you have a solid white coloured background on which you place the images that you might not see the dashes? Perhaps that's how MS Pub works?

While in the application it is possible that the dashes are not visible on screen because they are transparent but when they are printed the printer driver converts transparent areas to black? Just a guess.

[wearyplodder]

Hi Paul,

I think you have cracked it, and I am exceedingly grateful to you.  I filled the master page with a rectangle filled with white, and voila, when I printed a sample page the marks had disappeared.

Now I don't have to lie awake half the night trying to puzzle this out!

Many, many thanks!