Non-smooth printing of shapes

[Teresa_Martin@adobeforums.com]

We recently purchased the CS Suite. I have been making our company logos in Macromedia Freehand, and then exporting as EPS files so that the logos would be vectorized and wouldn't rely on system fonts and also so that they could be scaled up or down without worrying about loss of resolution and clarity. The problem with Freehand is that while working on the Mac platform, I could not export an EPS with a Windows preview. The only way to get a Windows preview was if you had a Windows version of Freehand.

When we received Illustrator, I was excited to discover that if I exported our logos out as a Legacy EPS and in Illustrator 3 format that it provided a Windows preview from my mac. All was well.... until....printing began to various printers.

When printed to a Xerox Docucolor, our logo (which contains curves made by paths in Illustrator), printed perfectly with smooth curves. When printing to one of our HP 4600 or HP 5500 printers using the Post Script drivers, the edges of our logo are no longer smooth when printed. They are not jagged like a rasterized image, but there are harsher straight lines in place of the smooth curves that were designed. Can some one please offer any information on this?????

Teresa
<http://www.hsmm.com>
<http://www.watersheconcepts.com>

[Chelan@adobeforums.com]

Sounds like a "Flatness settting" issue. Earlier versions of Illustrator had options where you could change the flatness settings for objects and files, but Illustrator CS does not have that option. It does however have a flatness setting in the print dialog box. It is in the graphics section. Try setting that to "Quality" before you export out the legacy EPS. I'm not sure if it will effect the exported EPS, but it's worth a shot.

P.S. Flatness basically describes how many straight lines are used to approximate curves in postscript.

Chelan

[Teresa_Martin@adobeforums.com]

I tried this, but it didn't help matters. Any other suggestions?

[Rene_Garneau@adobeforums.com]

Output Resolution.

In Illustrator 10 (I don't have CS), it's under File > Document Setup > then in the drop down menu, select Printing & Export. The Output Resolution should be set at 800 dpi (yours is probably set at 300).

[chromatica@adobeforums.com]

Rene,

I too am having this problem with simple lines made with the line tool in CS. Printing out to a Canon i9100 at full resolution/slow printing/etc (with the Output resolution set to 1200), I still get aliased lines (massive amounts of 'stepping'). I need to get this file out today - if anybody has a clue, I'd really appreciate an email.

So far I've tried:
(upgraded printer drivers to newest, of course)
Printing with output resolution at every option higher than 300 (made no difference)
Printing with 'convert strokes to outlines' on and off (made no difference)

Next on my list is up-sizing the document to 200% and then printing at 50% (seems unnecessary - isn't the way vectors are 'converted' to a bitmap for printing going to equate to the same print size?)

After that I'll try to run it through distiller - again more steps than I'd like.

Has anybody figured out a surefire way to get smooth lines out of AICS?

[Teresa_Martin@adobeforums.com]

Rene,

Is your problem with an Illustrator file or is it an EPS file made from Illustrator. I've discovered that my problem resides in saving the EPS file in Illustrator 3 format. It's that format that is causing my "stepping" or "jaggedness". I had save it back to such an old version for the sole purpose of being able to import it into Microsoft Word with a preview. It was the only format that would import into Office 2000. Now that we are upgrading to Office 2003, I've found that Word will no longer allow you to view the preview in that older format and that it will allow for an EPS file in Illustrator 8 format. Don't know if this helps you or not, but for what it's worth, that's what I've found out.

Teresa