Strange gray contours

[only7yb]

Why does Publisher render those gray contours around those black objects:

The eagle is not even visible - only when zoomed in it looks like this:

[Vosje]

It's because overprint is not working. Your document is probably CMYK and you're using 100% K over purple background. If you export your document to PDF and then view it with Acrobat, overprint WILL render the way it should. But Affinity apps competely ignore overprint and this results in this white "halo" around 100% K objects (it's as if there's no overprint but white background below 100% K). Overprint will also be ignored if you try to export to some other format, like JPEG, it only works when you export to PDF and then open your document with some other program that can handle overprint properly.

[4dimage]

@Vosje

Maybe you mean overprint ?

Here is the online help for this topic: https://affinity.help/publisher2/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Clr/overprint.html?title=Overprinting

Unfortunatley Affinity seems not to be able of simulating overprint in the viewport? If anyone knows - please show the trick.

 

I can reproduce the fault

The "halo" appears as soon as you change the document color format to CMYK. If you work with RGB everything looks ok in the viewport.

Document RGB:

 

Document CMYK:

 

Of course you will set the document color format to CMYK when working on a document targeted for CMYK offset printing.

 

I tried the following steps - following the Affinity help on spot colors with overprint (https://affinity.help/publisher2/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Clr/overprint.html?title=Overprinting).

 

In my example the upper textframe has pure CMYK black:

 

The lower textframe has my spot color:

 

Visually there is no difference in the viewport.

 

Furthermore this aproach would be dangerous because now you have a spot color in your document that produces an extra color separation.

You would have to be aware to untick the advanced option in PDF export prefs to finally have pure CMYK colors:

 

 

Unfortunately there is still no color separation | overprint preview in Affinity, to carefully check if you have done your preprint work properly.

Here is how this looks like e.g. in Illustrator:

 

By the way - this is NOT a nice to have in a professional DTP Software. This can be vital to avoid misprints that your customers will hold you accountable for.

 

Sorry, can't get rid of these two screenshots in the forum editor here ???????????

[Vosje]

20 minutes ago, 4dimage said:

@Vosje

Maybe you mean overprint ?

@4dimage, oops, yes I do, haha, sorry, don't know why I mixed that up, gonna edit the post! 😆 You're right, it's not normal that Affinity offers an option to create an overprint swatch but there's virtually no difference that you can SEE, you cannot do color separations to check whether everything is right etc. It's not a bug, maybe more like a missing function, but a very VITAL missing function in my eyes... This has been reported multiple times and I believe they don't even assign a "bug" number to such threads (like they do with other found bugs), so I guess is that they view it as a function that Affinity suite just doesn't offer at the moment and it's not known whether they plan to actually do something about it.

[only7yb]

Hello Affinity, any chances on fixing this overprint issue?

[Jon P]

Apologies this got missed, we've got an improvement logged to simulate overprint in the app