PDF's for clients with overprint preview

[claude72]

Using PDF 1.3 will bring you another issue: your customers will call you completely panicated by the fine white lines (resulting in the display of flattened transparencies) they'll see on their screen... and you'll then have to explain them how to turn off the anti-aliasing feature of their PDF reader...
... you'll just swap from your overprint display-only issue to another major display-only issue!

Did you try to export your PDF in JPEG and send the JPEG to your customers?
JPEG (is crap for printing, but) is easy to manage and view for standard "non-educationned" customers...

[Lukas Engqvist]

Well I send clients sRGB (converted to sRGB by colour management) PDFs with overprint simulation.

[prepressguru]

Thanks for the info I will try out what you sugguest. Maybe my understanding of transparencies is not as clear as I thought.. well they kinda are semi clear anyway

prepressguru,

Transparency does not rely on overprinting to work. To prove this, Within InDesign:
Create a Frame and color the fill Cyan
Create another frame covering part of the Cyan frame, change the fill to Yellow and tell this to multiply
Create a third frame, again covering part of the Cyan frame, change the fill to Yellow, and tell this to Overprint.

Export this as a PDF and view in Acrobat 8 or lower and turn off "Overprint Preview" You will notice the transparency remains green where the 2 colors intersect but the overprint is yellow.

[prepressguru]

Hey Claude, I thought about the jpeg route... but just means more un automated steps in our automated workflow.. why is printing so complex.. so I discarded that idea, well for now.

As for PDF level when we process in our workflow we use Arobat 5 (PDF 1.4) seems to be ok for all jobs. But I have been consider moving up to Acrobat 7. I found a issue with a effect in Illustrator when exporting to PDF as version 1.4, moving up to 1.6 fixed the problem. So it's challenged our status quo.

Thanks!

[claude72]

Hey Claude, I thought about the jpeg route... but just means more un automated steps in our automated workflow.. why is printing so complex.. so I discarded that idea, well for now.

Normally, I use PDF 1.4 exported from InDesign (to avoid fine white lines)...

... and JPEG is only a (good) workaround when the customer is not enough aware with the use of PDF, or when PDF doesn't work for any reason (including bugs in generating the PDF)!

(and the last solution is a screen-shot!!!)