Quark Forums

hi there

i keep getting an error message saying: "insufficient memory to rasterize transparent element on page #. reduce the flattening resolution in your output settings and try again" when i try to print a page of my document to PDF which has a drop shadow or semi-opaque element in it. this occurs even after i have reduced the flattening resolution to the minimum amount.. i have a fairly powerful pc with 2GB of RAM. are there any other settings i need to check? any advice gratefully received. many thanks...

Make sure you understand the differences between opacity and shade. Shade gives you a percentage of the ink without using any transparency. Opacity gives you a similar "shade" of ink, but uses transparency to get there.

With shade, a box with, for instance, a color of 100% black "shaded" to 50% will in effect give you 50% black. Place this over any item and the item below does not show thru. Just 50% black overlay (opaque).

With opacity, you will still get the same 50% black (when placed over white). But if you place over any other item, you are allowing "50%" of that item to show thru the black. Thereby invoking the "transparency" gods.

I don't know if this is what is going on in your document, but figured would be good to mention in case...

Hello, timb0land and anyone else with this issue or with a solution...

I'm having exactly the same problem, and this stinks beyond all reality.  I'm working on a relatively simple magazine cover, standard 8.5 x 11 page size.  It has a 300DPI full color image as the background; this JPG is 5MB.  This should not be any issue whatsoever.

Then, I have a 3 text boxes, with small amounts of text--a couple of lines in 24-36 point.  Also shouldn't be a problem.

The text boxes are transparent, so the text overprints the photo background.  Again, should not be an issue; it's simple design.

In order to add a bit of "depth" to the cover, I added drop shadows to the text by simply clicking "Enable Drop Shadows".  The default drop shadow settings are used which really has to have transparency in it; the default is 75% opacity.  And, just like timb0land, I get the same error message when exporting this page to a PDF, or when "printing" to a PDF using a PDF print driver.  The error is in Quark processing.

If you saw this page, it would stand out ONLY for it's simplicity.  It is not complex at all.

Trouble is, I have a reasonably powerful PC, like timb0land.  It is a 1.6GHz Core2 Duo.  I have all kinds of extra memory on my hard drive (which theoretically at least should be used for swap files and image processing), and 2GB of RAM.

If I can't do simple drop shadows on simple text, and not much of it, over a simple single photo with this kind of hardware--exactly what would happen if I decided to get complex?  You know, lots of Beziers, dozens of text boxes, blends, etc.  If this simplicity is choking on 2GB, then 98% of Quark's features on my machine, at least, probably won't export to PDF or print, and sadly therefore are useless?  That's just a single page I'm working on!  What if I were doing an entire magazine?

I did indeed get the page to export to a PDF by going in and disabling all drop shadows.  Then it exported/printed to the PDF just fine.  However, the single page PDF (remember it started with a 300 DPI, 5 MB base image) is now 200 MB!  By contrast, I recreated the page in MS Publisher as best as I could, printed to a PDF and that page is only 7 MB.  How on earth did Quark create a 200 MB PDF file, particularly when the complexities of drop shadows and transparency has been eliminated?

Am I, and timb0land, missing something here?  I thought moving from MS-Publisher to Quark would provide greater design flexibility.  So far, simple black text on my first test page is printing screened, not solid (Quark is "working" on the problem); now this memory issue on my first real project.

Has anyone found a solution to this error with drop shadows?

I can see lots of people still having problems and a variety of solutions:

uncheck 'Multiply drop shadow'.

Remove flattening when printing and use Acrobate to flatten.

Alter opacity/shade.

However I haven't found anything which works. I can't print any Quark file with a drop shadow and since this is the only effect you can add to text this severely limits its applications for me as I design book covers!

Any help or advice or anyone who has found a way of working around this would be very much appreciated.

KB Article

Alternatively. Export as a PS file with native transparency (i.e., turn off the flattener settings completely so the PS file does NOT flatten), open your Distiller Job Option setting in a text editor. Find the line that says "/AllowTransparency false". Change it to "/AllowTransparency true". Save. You may want to do this with a duplicated (or new) job option. Distill the PS file

Distiller won't natively distill PS files with transparency so you have to tell it to do so. Bear in mind your filesize will be MUCH larger. This is a workaround, but it will let you get a PDF out.

See my post here.