Yeah that is what I thought also. Any good commercial printer must be using a software package that does automatic flattening of PDFs in the Prepress stage of their workflow, I know it's set as one of our traps. When we finally get around to installing Kodak Prinergy 4, it will be using the Adobe PDF rendering engine and transparencies will no longer be an issue.
-Tim -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:scribus-bounces at kirsche.altmuehlnet.de] On Behalf Of Craig Bradney Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2008 4:34 AM To: D. R. Evans Subject: Re: [Scribus] 2 questions > I finally reached their "PDF expert" and chatted with him. > > So the real scoop is that problems are caused if you use transparency > anywhere in a PDF. > > "OK so the issue there is that transparencies simply are not supported > in a > high speed commercial digital print environment. > > they need to be resolved to the final pixel--ie flattened" > > So my experience is that if you make use of transparency anywhere, it might > or might not work with scribus "out of the box". > > Their first recommendation for Linux users is to use GIMP :-) but otherwise > if you use transparency anywhere then you MUST flatten the output if > you want it to work reliably. > > (Incidentally, one of the other tech support people there also > mentioned that one should use PDF 1.4 or earlier.) What sort of rubbish answer is that? If they are going to "support" PDF 1.4, then they need to support transparencies. Ok, Scribus needs to get a flattener built in at some point, (patent mine-field, btw), but they need to recheck their specs. With PDF now at 1.7, I doubt 1.3 is going to be used "by default" by most unknowing customers in the future. Craig _______________________________________________ Scribus mailing list Scribus at nashi.altmuehlnet.de http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/mailman/listinfo/scribus
