Feathered shape does not export to PDF

**Noel Williams** · 31 July 2008, 12:35 PM

I've been tearing my hair out with frustration trying to produce a PDF of a large banner for our printer. I keep getting 'Access violation exception at offset 0x0201CF15' when trying to use the Commercial Printing option. (I get no message and no PDF with the High Quality setting.)

By a process of elimination I discovered that the problem is caused by two simple coloured blocks with feathered edges.

I deleted all the other elements of the design so this is now a tiny file.
Can anyone else get this file to export to commercial quality PDF??

I'd be grateful for any advice.

Noel Williams

**handrawn** · 31 July 2008, 12:51 PM

only by reducing the banners to within the page boundaries
see attached
I would guess that the outer boundary of the feather needs to be within the page area ?

**Noel Williams** · 31 July 2008, 01:27 PM

Many thanks for your suggestion. I've had to try another approach because I only want the feather effect to be visible on the inside edge.

I've moved the coloured block inside the page area, removed feathering and replaced it with transparency applied to the inside edge.
However, when I export to PDF I get a blank page.

This is a very simple feature which surely should work.

Any other suggestions welcomed.

**ss-kalm** · 31 July 2008, 01:30 PM

If you don't want the outside edges, and that's why they are off the page, draw a rectangle round what you do want and use clipview, and then export from there.

**Noel Williams** · 31 July 2008, 01:45 PM

No joy with Clipview.

No joy with Create Bitmap Copy.

I still end up with a blank PDF.

**handrawn** · 31 July 2008, 02:24 PM

just tried altering a few settings - but it keeps crashing

may be something to do with the size of the document - hopefully someone who deals with this sort of size regularly will be able to help

**Albacore** · 31 July 2008, 02:35 PM

It is the unusual page size that is causing the problem. When you change the size down to A0 it exports no problem. Also tried is A4 landscape and it did the same but can't understand why it couldn't do the custom page size? Have a shot yourself and see what happens. I will try it in Illustrator for you and see if it will export from there.

**mg.architect** · 31 July 2008, 02:52 PM

Noel,
When using Xara in my work I've had very good success installing and using a pdf creator called PDF995 (it's free with a nag screen).
After you install it and you have your document ready to convert to pdf, instead of exporting, select print then select PDF995 as the printer and you should get a perfect pdf.

As has already been mentioned make sure you actually are drawing within the boundary's of your page size.

Just my 2 cents...

mg

**Noel Williams** · 31 July 2008, 02:54 PM

Thanks Albacore. Yes, it works fine with an A0 page size.

So it's the large custom page size that's the problem.

**Soquili** · 31 July 2008, 03:05 PM

Noel you may want to set your custom page size to 1745pix x 820pix then use a Scale Factor of 1pix = 1mm.

A quick test and no error when exporting to pdf.