Rectangle appears behind text when printing .pdf

[charliescoffee]

I’m doing a flyer for someone. When I printed a copy off an exported .pdf file, which I suspect is what the customer will be doing, I got a darker rectangle behind some of the text. The same thing doesn’t show on my screen with the Xara file or with the .pdf. I recall this happening before, a long time ago, and I don’t remember what, if anything, I did about it. I’ll attach some files. Anyone have any ideas?

[steve.ledger]

Looks like a limitation of your particular printer/print driver.

I printed with and without the drop shadow on my SAMSUNG CLP-300N colour laser and it looked fine.

scanned print result


Personally I'd not use the drop shadow when printing on standard home printers. They look fine on screen for web pages, but usually just smudgy on home printers.
Better to use a solid black copy behind the original and slightly offset it.

[charliescoffee]

Sledger,
Yes, I think you’re right. I wasn’t using a home printer, though. I had a great wide carriage Epson which recently got ripped off. This copy was done at the local Office Max and I never noticed what kind of printer they used. Interestingly, I did a copy just yesterday using essentially the same file (one of the jpegs had to be replaced) without this problem. With my printer, which a dearly miss, I got great drop shadows, but perhaps I should consider doing as you suggest. I’ve used this technique once in a while, especially when I have to bend a shadow around backgrounds of different depths.
Thanks!

[Albacore]

Hi Charles,
Had a look at your file and I take it you sent this file off to the print shop as a PDF? If yes there would be two things that I would have done. Firstly made the drop shadows vector if you can, that means not using the shadow tool and secondly put the text on the top most layer. It is the way the export filter renders the shadow as a bitmap therefore giving this slightly discoloured rectangle. Having the text in the top most layer reduces the amount of overprint I may have used the wrong term there (I have got the pigging swine flu and my brain is not working at its best).

It took me ages when using InDesign to learn this trick of always having the text on the top of everything and yes I used layers there as well. If you are using a non system font render the text as objects before exporting and either have a hidden layer which you copied all your text into before hand or save to separate copies of your file. I know the PDF export does it foe you but it can do funny things to L's sometimes.

[charliescoffee]

Thanks all, I just saw the finished product today and it looks excellent.