Quark Forums

I have created a piece of artwork in Quark 7.5 which consists of a round picture box (which has a drop shadow). The picture box is positioned so that it slightly overlaps 2 large circles of colour. These 2 circles overlap each other also - the bottom one is a solid pantone colour, the top one is a pantone colour but with an opacity of 75%.

After creating a high quality pdf file, the pdf does not display (or print) these circles/picture box correctly. It looks as if there is a slightly transparent square picture box just below the round picture box but on top of the coloured circles. This only appears to happen when the round picture boxes are positioned on top of the circle which has a 75% opacity.

I can't figure out how to fix it. I tried making the coloured circles cmyk instead of pantone but that didn't fix it. I've also tried increasing the resolution of the drop shadows in the pdf settings but that didn't work either.

Can anyone help?

not sure if this is similar but i only resolved it by adding transparency back into the pdf using Pitstop. 7.5's flattening leaves a lot to be desired.

http://forums.quark.com/p/21306/85760.aspx#85760 

What is Pitstop? I've not heard of it before.

 Its a PlugIn for Acrobat, that has a whole suite of tools for editing PDFs. Its pretty much essential for prepress depts.

Have had a look at Pistop - looks good but seems a bit expensive to me especially as I don't usually have any other problems in creating pdf's from Quark. Why do Quark bother to offer a method of creating drop shadows and opacity if they don't work properly?

Also, it appears that its not just a pdf problem. When I printed straight from Quark the problem was still there.

I would love some advice or an answer to this problem otherwise I'll have to start adapting designs to ensure I don't use a drop shadow overlaid onto an opacity. Don't want to look stupid in front of clients when they realise the design they have approved cannot be followed through.

Thanks

Quark7 was the first version that let you create drop shadows without an Xtension, I agree they ought to fix these problems in this version but once they move on a version they choose not to, Quark8 would handle more transparency situations and quark8.1 finally bypasses the heavy maths and offers native transparency, its a huge leap forward from v7 but still lacking compared to InDesign.

Just a question: have you unchecked Multiply opacity?