PDF displays wrong thickness of placed Illustrator linework

[Marc_Hawkins@adobeforums.com]

I am working in QuarkXpress 6.1, and placing Illustrator 10 Eps illustrations in the file.

The illustrations are simplified drawings of Sport Apparel (shorts) which have a black keyline around the outer edge. When I make a pdf using Acrobat professional (both high res print quality or low-res for emailing proofs) the black lines around the edges of the shorts either disappear in some areas, or become really thick, then thin in others.

Typically I would send native collected files from quark, but the Litho Print shop the client is using requires high res PDFs.
As of right now, these are not acceptable quality files for printing and my client is not happy.

PLEASE HELP!!!!

[M_Brady@adobeforums.com]

How are you viewing the drawings? Fit in window on screen? Often what you are describing is the display effect of a hairline falling either between pixels on screen, thus seeming to disappear, or being drawn with two pixels or antialiasing, which seems to thicken the stroke. Try zooming in at a high magnification and examining the lines. Are they correct, or do they still show the variations you describe?

Michael Brady

[Marc_Hawkins@adobeforums.com]

The variations appear even when i print the pdf out on our Color laser printer.
They also appeared as a final printed Flyer that came back from the print shop yesterday.
I too, thought it was just a problem with the screen and incorrectly told the client so. Unfortunately I was not given the proofs to review before litho printing, so I did could not catch it. 5,000 were printed incorrectly.

The problem happens anytime I put a black line with a tranparent fill around any of the drawings. I am doing this to create a consistent keyline around the little drawings, but they are not outputting consistent (and sometimes the lines will fall out completely on one side, but not the other).

As it stands I will not be able to send a high res pdf to a pritner if I am not 100% sure it will appear the way my native Quark files do. This is a case of what I see, is NOT what I get if I turn it into a PDF. Ive been sending files to print for over twelve years (always Native files). I am forced to use high res pdfs because of this printer, but I am feeling like a fresh-from school noob right now.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

[M_Brady@adobeforums.com]

Are you putting that keyline around the drawings in Illustrator, then importing them? In the past, I noticed that when I exported EPS images that included a box around the image (i.e., the outer edge of the EPS) from FreeHand, the stroke was clipped because the thickness straddled the path of the stroke. So I got used to putting a second box with no stroke around the one with a black stroke, just a wee bit bigger, in order to make the EPS include the full width of the stroke. That may be at play here. Maybe not.

[Marc_Hawkins@adobeforums.com]

THANK YOU!
This worked great for the images where the keyline was dropping off on some edges. Did not fix the issue of the line weights being drastically differnt from one edge to the next, but this is a great help!

I saw another post that had a similar problem, but with overlapping transparent images and type. The fix involves changing the Transparency settings. I will play around with that for awhile. If I ever figure it out I will post the fix here in case others come across this problem.

Once again, thank you M_Brady!

[Marc_Hawkins@adobeforums.com]

Found a fix for the uneven stroke problem.
Hopefully I will find a better solution later, but for now it works fine.
If I change the stroke to an object (using the Object >Expand feature), then it is no longer a stroke and the pdf looks perfect.

It is not the best solution because then i cant change the thickness of the stroke if I want to later (maybe I can using the Offset command).

Either way, this will work for now.

Whewww!! :)

[Mark_Larsen@adobeforums.com]

This is down to the OPI XTension in Quark if you are not using this feature of quark turn it off in the "XTensions Manager" and your pdfs output will be fine.