I have a template which uses a pdf background watermark which is basically just small repeated text across the whole page. I then have a few png images (logos and signatures) which have a transparent background over the top. Everything looks fine in Designer, and on the PDF output it all looks good on my screen, but when I send it through to print on our production printer the text in the background is coming out fainter where the bounding box for the images sit, so you can basically see the box around the image on the print.
We had previously used Printshop Mail to create this template using the same resources and I’ve never had this issue there. I’m not sure if there’s a better way to flatten the pdf/image together in the print process to get round this issue, any suggestions would be very welcome!
Are you still printing on the same printer as you did with PrintShop Mail Suite? And what printer model and output type are you using in the output preset / print wizard?
Hi Manuel, we upgraded our production printer along with the software so we are using a Canon printer now instead of a Xerox. We’re still using a Fiery to process the jobs which is much the same. I still have access to PrintShop Mail however I don’t have this issue when processing the print job through PSM onto the same new printer. I’m just using the default job creation and output creation settings to create a generic PDF.
Would you be able to upload the PDFs you get from both PrintShop Mail and Connect Designer?
We may be able to compare those.
Another thing to check, is perhaps the printer preferences: when printing PDF to a Windows printer, the printer preferences of the printer itself (the ones that can be found in the Windows settings for that printer) are also in play. These can differ per user, and the Connect Server can run as a different user. I am not sure what settings would affect this, if any, but it doesn’t hurt to verify that you are using the same settings in both cases.
Unfortunately I can’t share the PDFs as the documents, and particularly the elements that are affected, are sensitive. We are only using Connect Server/Workflow to create the PDFs, which are then just drag and dropped onto the Fiery command workstation, which is where any print settings are applied. The main difference I would say between what we do on PrintShop Mail and Connect is that the output file is a PS from PrinstShop Mail and a PDF from Connect. I may try to see if I can get Connect to output as a PS to see if this is any better.
That can be a big difference: PS supports almost no transparency, so that’s typically flattened before sending the job to the printer. PDF does allow transparency, which is then either handled by the Fiery, or by the printer itself if it natively supports PDF (not sure how many printers have that).
Assuming it’s handled by the Fiery, the question then becomes: is there something in the generated PDF that causes this, or is the Fiery doing something that’s undesirable? If the latter, can you tell it to stop doing that? I guess it can use different drivers and settings depending on what printer it’s sending the job to.
Sending PostScript instead of PDF is likely to change things.