Illustrator Question

[Tracy]

This will be simple for you guys.
When illy tells you artwork requires flattening. what should I do?
Can you flatten it in illustrator?
I have an illy file going directly to a lable printer.

[Joe]

Yes Illy can flatten it. It has to flatten it if you are trying to save as an EPS.

Also the act of printing will flatten the PS being sent to the printer but not the original.

[DigitalCrapShoveler]

Actually you can. Go to /Object/Flatten Transparency.


If you are going to import into ID, then save it as a native AI file and place. It is not necessary to flatten an AI file importing into ID. Unless you have a reason to export as an eps.

[almaink]

If you need to flatten make sure you also set the document raster effects to at least 300 DPI. It's under effects in the menu.

[Tracy]

as always you guys are so helpful :grin:

[ninjaPB_43]

Tracy if you get a spare moment give this WONDERFUL article a glance over, it will really help..

Best Pdf's

excerpt from article
"Flattening transparent objects
The trouble with transparency is that PostScript doesn't understand it. Transparent objects have to be "flattened" prior to output to any kind of PostScript-based printing device. Where this flattening should happen, and by whom, is a key issue.

In Adobe CS2 applications, a graphic object is a source of transparency if any of the following applies:

    * It has an opacity of less than 100 percent or an opacity mask (Illustrator).
    * It has any blending mode other than Normal.
    * It has a drop shadow or feather.
    * It has a inner glow or outer glow effect (Illustrator).
    * Its fill or stroke has a style, brush, pattern or filter effect that has any of the previous properties.
    * It is a placed Photoshop file (native, PDF or TIFF) with a transparent background.
    * It is a placed Illustrator file (native or PDF) that contains one or more objects with any of the previous properties.

QuarkXPress 7 also includes the ability to create drop shadows or otherwise add transparency to objects, but because all output from Quark is PostScript-based (even PDF export), transparent objects have to be flattened to a specific bitmap resolution or removed when the PDF file is created. In Adobe CS2 and Acrobat 7, the transparency flattener will rasterize or outline objects, based on the types of objects being flattened, the file's complexity and the settings that are in effect when the flattening takes place. Three default settings are provided by Adobe, "high resolution" being the best option to maintain as much vector data as possible, although it is easy to create custom flattener settings to do things like convert everything to bitmaps or convert all text to outlines.

Flat and unhappy
Transparency flattening can lead to many problems. Any text that touches a transparent object can be rasterized during the flattening process. In most RIPs, text is imaged at a higher resolution than raster objects (usually at the highest resolution of the output device). Rasterized text is especially unsightly when just a portion of a line is converted to bitmaps, while the rest of the line remains text and is imaged at a higher resolution.

Text also can be converted to outlines by the flattener, which can result in a thickening of the stroke making up the outline of each letter. If the user chooses the option to outline all text, every text object on the page will be outlined, whether or not it touches a transparent object. Even if this option is not selected, the flattener might outline the text that is involved with transparent objects anyway, making for a possible unsightly difference between the outlined characters and the rest of the normal text on the page.

Flattening also can break all objects involved in transparency into "atomic regions." Suppose there is a spot-colored vector object with a blend mode of "multiply" sitting on top of a bitmap image with a drop shadow beneath it, on top of a background of another spot color. When the vector object and the drop shadow are flattened, all of the objects involved likely will be broken into new objects or atomic regions that might be vector- or bitmap-based, depending on what it takes to render the transparency into something a PostScript device can digest.

For example, the flattener might use overprinting commands (supported in PostScript) to create transparent effects using opaque objects, especially when flattening a transparency that interacts with a spot color. In fact, in order to print or view a PDF file containing flattened transparent objects correctly, it is necessary to use software that supports overprinting. Without overprinting support, overprint objects will knock out whatever is beneath them. If you've ever used Acrobat or Reader to preview a PDF file and instead of seeing a soft drop shadow behind an image, you see a white box around a harsh black box instead, it probably was because overprint preview wasn't enabled. The same is true at print time — if the device doesn't support overprinting, objects that have been flattened and require overprint capabilities to render properly will knock out.

Some users report seeing white, hairline-like artifacts at the edges of some atomic regions when they view a flattened PDF file in Acrobat or Reader. Turning off the "smooth line art" and "smooth images" option in the page display area of Acrobat's general preferences will cause the preview of these lines to disappear. It is important for prepress operators to see these, however, because they can predict where similar lines can appear in the actual printed piece when it's output through certain systems. It seems that, in some cases, InRIP trapping will create a "choke" or pull-back trap between the atomic regions, creating an actual gap between them. While turning off InRIP trapping typically eliminates this problem, you've then removed all trapping from the file. Note that it might be necessary to disable only "image to image" trapping, to eliminate this problem while still allowing the rest of the job to trap as it should"

[Tracy]

that helps me to understand flattening more.
easy read too.
thanks i so appreciate it.

[ninjaPB_43]

no prob, I have it bookmarked and send it to customers frequently.  :grin: