I just discovered that I cannot get CDX7 to publish to a PDF and have a gradient hit the pdf as a smooth shade (axial) object. Instead, X7 breaks the gradient into individual objects for each step of the gradient.
X6 works fine on the same file (well, back-saved).
I have attached a file for checking. You'll need Acrobat to check the gradient type, but importing or opening the Published PDF will demonstrate what I am yammering about.
Please tell me that there is a setting I must have missed...
Thanks, Mike
Which PDF preset are you using, and have you changed any settings ?
Hmmm, I tested this with the prepress preset and it seems clear that X6 and X7 are behaving very differently with this gradient.
But I can create other gradients (eg black to red) which create PDFs which re-import into X7 and are still gradients.
The difference is the mid point. In the file from the first post, the gradient mid point is set to 54% :
The problem does not happen if the mid point is changed back to 50%. BUT ... the mid point is also set to 54% in the X6 version of the file.
I'm not totally sure X6 behaves correctly though. If you set the mid point to something extreme like 90% so that it is visually distinct, it re-imports as a gradient that looks like the original, but supposedly has a 50% mid point and cannot be edited without turning to black and white.
Sorry for the delay in responding, Harry.
Any preset, really. But PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-3 would be the ones I care most about.
Mid-point obviously shouldn't matter. I didn't muck around with moving the mid-point in X6, sounds like it is broken as well in an extreme mid-point setting.
Thanks for looking at it.
Mike
Use Acrobat 6 or higher and then your viewer must support live transparency, I.E. Acrobat with a Professional plugin or a RIP pre press application. No Illustrator or other dime store viewer.
David Milisock said:Use Acrobat 6 or higher and then your viewer must support live transparency, I.E. Acrobat with a Professional plugin or a RIP pre press application. No Illustrator or other dime store viewer.
Geez, David. I wasn't born yesterday. Did you look at the file? Export/Publish however, whatever type, you want and inspect it in Acrobat. The screen shot was made in Acro XI. This PDF was produced from X7 using Acrobat 9 compatibility.
But it doesn't matter the type as PDF/X supports smooth shading and X6 handles this properly, X7 does not. Pretty simple. 248 individually colored vector objects representing the gradient when published from X7. Really not good.
Here is a PDF that works perfectly in Pitstop Pro and all my RIPS Published to PDF as Acrobat 6 and any concept that the PDF export from CDGS is wrong is not correct. You must use professional tools to examine the PDF.
As I say: "gradient more complicated than 2 colors". Check this file, I added one more color and transparency.
http://we.tl/cZOF4hobnv
Here is the same file exported from Corel as Ai and export from Ai to pdf. No slices, no bitmaps and file weight 65KB vs 1,3MB...