Faint gray outlines showing up on exported PDFs

[Paul PKS]

When I export Publisher files to PDF, I'm having trouble with faint gray outlines showing up on 1) transparent PNGs with white backgrounds, and 2) text that is stroked with white. I've already gone through the basic troubleshooting and don't think it's from anything I'm doing on my end. Any ideas on how to fix this?

[firstdefence]

Could you upload the afdesign/afphoto or afpub file?

Have you tried placing a white rectangle behind the graphics with the gray edge?

[thomaso]

Hi @Paul PKS, Welcome to the Affinity Forums!

Did you check if the PNG contains at this edges opaque pixels (= not fully transparent pixels), possible left overs from an isolation procedure.?

How did you add the white contour to the text? If it is an applied stroke, aligned outside, you could test if the contour is related to this recent bug report and try an outline layer effect instead. Two other tests to avoid the dark contour might be: Convert the affected text frames into curves, or export with option "rasterize all" (flattened).

1 hour ago, firstdefence said:

placing a white rectangle behind the graphics

This would cover all graphics behind this PNG and this text, right?

[thomaso]

@Paul PKS, can you test if the lines may be "just" a display issue and do not appear in a different PDF viewing app (e.g. a browser window) or if you open the PDF in Affinity?

17 minutes ago, thomaso said:

1 hour ago, firstdefence said:

placing a white rectangle behind the graphics

This would cover all graphics behind this PNG and this text, right?

@firstdefence, did you mean to place a white rectangle as page background behind all graphics, as it appears to help in this thread for instance:

[firstdefence]

30 minutes ago, thomaso said:

did you mean to place a white rectangle as page background behind all graphics, as it appears to help in this thread for instance:

Hi @thomaso Yes, that was the idea.

[Paul PKS]

The white rectangle underneath all the layers didn't take care of the problem by itself, but combining that with rasterizing everything at export did fix the issue. Unfortunately I need the document to be searchable, so that wasn't going to be workable in the long run. I ended up just altering the images and stroke lines to avoid the issue altogether, but it seems like there isn't a best-case fix yet for Affinity.

I appreciate all the help and suggestions!

[thomaso]

5 hours ago, Paul PKS said:

I ended up just altering the images and stroke lines to avoid the issue altogether

Could you let us know in what way you altered this objects to successfully avoid the issue of the disturbing contours? Were text and images modified in the same way?

5 hours ago, Paul PKS said:

rasterizing everything at export did fix the issue. Unfortunately I need the document to be searchable, so that wasn't going to be workable in the long run.

Another workaround: Alternatively to rasterizing everything, you could rasterize selected elements only (via menu command or right-click) and have a copy of the text objects in the colour of the background ('invisible', e.g. white) or hidden behind an opaque background object. Then an exported PDF will be searchable while the visible text is rasterized.

  rasterized & searchable.pdf