disappearing keyline

[andyfest]

I haven't seen this happen until now, but here goes: we received a trapped, "finished" pdf file that uses a screened magenta keyline around some knock-out white text on a C+M screened background. I had to delete some junk from around the dieline on the file so I opened it with Illy CS6 (I know - I've opened a can of worms here), and the keyline comes out as a 0/0/0/0 overprinted white ie: it disappears. The only way I can make it appear correctly is to fill the overprinting white keyline shape with 0.25% screen of Cyan to reveal the Magenta underneath. I've never had to do this so I'm wondering now if the artist used some new-fangled appearance options in Illy CC that my CS6 version doesn't interpret correctly. I've attached a screenshot of the Acrobat view on left and the Illy view on the right.

[jimking]

That text appears outlined. The red perhaps is just an indicator of outlined fonts in the Illustrator file. I believe Indy does this also.

[DigiCorn]

That text appears outlined. The red perhaps is just an indicator of outlined fonts in the Illustrator file. I believe Indy does also.

Possible. Turn off "show frame edges," or set preview mode to "overprint" to confirm.

[andyfest]

That text appears outlined. The red perhaps is just an indicator of outlined fonts in the Illustrator file. I believe Indy does this also.

No, the custy confirmed that the keyline was meant to be a M screen. If I drop the pdf file into an auto workflow in Nexus that just rasters and screens, the keyline appears as it should on the screened 1 bits. I'm really puzzled over this one.

[DigiCorn]

After closer examination, the rule above is now dashed instead of solid... and the keyline appears around the yellow "FOR" in the darker section. How is that different?

[andyfest]

The darker line around the yelo text is just the trapline into the background. The Magenta keylines on two areas of the carton were built differently. On one panel the keyline "shape", which sits underneath the white text, is coloured 100% Magenta. All those keylines show properly. It's just the screened Magenta keylines on the panel I illustrated that are the issue. In those cases it looks like the artist used a white or maybe a "near-white" overprinting shape to push the Cyan back and leave the Magenta keyline. I'm wondering if they used a really low % (0.1% or something like that) of Cyan in the overprinting white push-out shape underneath the white text and Illy just sees it as 0% OR I'm left wondering if there is a new option in Illy CC's appearance pallette.

[DigiCorn]

Can you upload the file so I can examine it more closely?

[andyfest]

I wish I could Dig, but our pharma security protocols forbid it. Also the supplied pdf is over 150 mB.

[Joe]

I haven't seen this happen until now, but here goes: we received a trapped, "finished" pdf file that uses a screened magenta keyline around some knock-out white text on a C+M screened background. I had to delete some junk from around the dieline on the file so I opened it with Illy CS6 (I know - I've opened a can of worms here), and the keyline comes out as a 0/0/0/0 overprinted white ie: it disappears. The only way I can make it appear correctly is to fill the overprinting white keyline shape with 0.25% screen of Cyan to reveal the Magenta underneath. I've never had to do this so I'm wondering now if the artist used some new-fangled appearance options in Illy CC that my CS6 version doesn't interpret correctly. I've attached a screenshot of the Acrobat view on left and the Illy view on the right.

I don't want to get into that whole "Illustrator is not a PDF" editor thing but if it looks OK in Acrobat but not Illustrator I would think opening it in Illustrator might be the issue. Do you not have Pitstop to edit the PDF with?

[andyfest]

To be honest Joe, no we don't have Pitstop, or any other type of pdf editor for that matter. Several years ago we priced out getting the pdf input front end of Nexus, which would have included Neo as a pdf editor, but the corp suits turned down funding. All they ended up getting us was the Nexus pdf RIP for the back end, which we absolutely needed to process some of our finished and imposed pdf gangs. Since then we have been stuck using the "classic" Nexus v10.1.2 font end, pdf back end to process files, with no real concrete solution for the future. I agree with you that Illy isn't the best route for editing or deleting unwanted items from a pdf, but this client uses Illy to build the files, then traps thru Esko's AE12 to a pdf. The pdf > Illy method has always worked up to now - this is the first time I've run into an issue. I have a manual fix, but can't really explain why the issue happened in the first place. 99% of our clients give us CS5 or CS6 Illy files to work from.

[beermonster]

if the job was trapped using esko power trapper it may be a pulled back colour - this might need correcting in "colour pairs" at trap stage

we get similar with say 100m 100y mix - powertrapper (aka by me as powercrapper) in it's wisdom pulls back the yellow to leave a magenta edge - we have to select that in colour pairs and reverse the trap

maybe it's something similar, but you wont be able to do that because its done at trap stage

i also see some crazy shyt happen when a trapped file comes out of artpro and back into illy

[andyfest]

Looks like your probably right about the trapping technique they used beer. We ended up editing the file to a usable pdf in Acro 10 and running it thru Nexus. That seems to have retained the unusual trapping that had been applied and retained the coloured keyline. The other manual "fix" in Illy was to colour the keyline with a 0.25% overprinting Cyan, and voila, the Magenta appeared. Weird...

[beermonster]

neh - it was a lucky guess



of course if you can outline any pdf with this shit it you can get that into illustrator and if you're really lucky there might be a trap layer and you can just delete the wrong bit