White lines and fat lines in PDF files

My good friend Von Glitschka posted the following tweet the other day:

Hey @Adobe will you ever fix this preview bug? It's nearly a decade old now. My client: "Your pdfs make the “l” (el) look bold."
— Von Glitschka (@Vonster) January 21, 2014

Many people experience this issue, along with another good one -- seeing white lines within PDF files. Both of these screen artifacts (and they are just that -- screen artifacts -- they don't show up in print) are caused by the same culprit -- antialiasing. As I explained in this previous post, antialiasing is a double-edged sword. It solves some problems (gets rid of the jaggies), but it can also introduce other issues (on-screen artifacts). It's like any medication -- it aims to solve one thing, but often can introduce side effects.

You can easily get rid of the side effects (the white lines and the fat lines) by disabling the specific antialiasing settings that introduce them -- directly in Adobe Acrobat Preferences. The two culprits in this case are Smooth Line Art and Enhance Thin Lines.

For a more in-depth understanding of when these issues occur, why they occur, and how to adjust your settings to get rid of them, I recorded this 12-minute clip for your viewing pleasure:



If you have additional questions about either of these issues, don't hesitate to drop a comment into this post or the YouTube link.

ADDED:

By the way, I didn't mention this in the video clip above, but it's POSSIBLE that you could see these white lines appear in print. How? OK, let's assume this scenario -- you create an ad in InDesign or Illustrator and create a PDF/X-1a file. This is a GOOD move on your part. Sending a validated PDF/X-1a file is the best way to submit files to someone else when they are going to print it.

The assumption is that the person who receives your file will open the PDF in Acrobat (or place it into InDesign) and then print it from there. If that's the case, all is right in the world and your clients will sing your praises (although they will surely still only want to pay you barely minimum wage).

HOWEVER, there are those (evil people) who will choose to open your PDF file in Photoshop. Perhaps because they think this is better. In that case, depending on how the file is saved from Photoshop, those white lines could get baked into the file itself (as once the file is in Photoshop, it's all converted to pixels). I've seen "smart" prepress operators think that due to the white lines they see in Acrobat, it's better to open the file in PS instead and then apply blurs or other effects to try and "get rid" of the white lines. This is silly behavior and can cause numerous other problems in the PDF (i.e. loss of spot colors, font hinting, etc).

Bottom line -- if you have a PDF, print it from Acrobat or InDesign (or Illustrator). NOT from Photoshop. Your designers (and clients) will thank you.

ASK MORDY: Document Size and Bleed

My good friend Marco from MacMojo.nl asked me this question:

We used to work with Creative suite 1. Now we're happy CS3 users but the Illustrator art with bleed does not show up anymore when I place it in InDesign. Of course I could open all the files and make the document extra large to include the bleed, but for the designers it's faster to just see if and where the bleed is. Would you happen to know if there's a 'fast fix' for this?

This question actually opens up a rather large can of worms. The answer involves a bug that's currently in Illustrator.

As I always do when I teach, it helps to understand the underlying principles before trying to arrive at a solution. The journey is longer, but far more important as we pick up useful information along the way.

I'll start off first by pointing you to a rather famous post I wrote nearly two years ago entitled EPS is Dead to Me (or is it?)... which dealt with some of the important concepts you need to be familiar with when talking about this subject of document size and bleed.

To summarize:

- When you save a file out of Illustrator as a native .ai file (which is what the folks at Adobe tell you to do when you want to place files from Illustrator into InDesign), there's a checkbox called "Create PDF Compatible File" which is on by default. Basically, Illustrator creates a composite PDF of your document and includes it within your native Illustrator file. When you place your AI file into InDesign, InDesign reads and places the PDF file that's embedded within the AI file.

- A PDF file has five different "box" attributes that define the boundaries of any page. These boxes are:
ArtBox. Also called the bounding box, this area is defined by the art that appears in the document.
TrimBox. This area is defined by the Illustrator artboard and is the size you specify when creating a new document.
CropBox. This area is defined by using the Object > Crop Area > Make command in Illustrator.
BleedBox. This area is defined by the Bleed setting you define in the Save As PDF dialog and extends beyond the TrimBox area.
MediaBox. This area is defined by the size of the page on which you choose to print your file (is usually determined by the printer, not Illustrator).



If you want to view these boxes individually for any PDF file (although be aware that not all PDF files necessarily have all boxes defined), open the PDF in Acrobat Professional and choose Advanced > Print Production > Crop Pages. Then uncheck the Show All Boxes option, choose a Box from the popup menu and look at the preview.



You can also choose the Show Art, Trim, & Bleed Boxes option in the Page Display settings in Acrobat Preferences.

Now that we understand this, we can move on to the problem. Illustrator does a few things that make things difficult for us:

- Illustrator requires that objects be on the Illustrator Artboard (found in Document Setup or when you first create a file) in order for those objects to be visible on a printout or when placed into another application via the PDF format. This is not the case for files saved as EPS. If you understand the concept of what TrimBox is, this would seem to make sense. However, the ArtBox should reveal these objects -- at least according to my understanding of the setting.

- Illustrator will clip any object that falls outside the Artboard area. Meaning if an object is partially on the artboard and partially on the pasteboard, the result will be clipped so only the part that is on the artboard will be visible in the PDF. Again, this is not the case for EPS. Again, if you understand the concept of what TrimBox is, this would seem to make sense. However, the ArtBox should reveal these objects -- at least according to my understanding of the setting.

- Illustrator has no way to define a BleedBox for the PDF portion of a native Illustrator file. This means you can't properly define a TrimBox (or document size) and then allow for a bleed -- because you can't define a BleedBox. So you're forced to create your TrimBox (the Document Size) at your BLEED size. Otherwise, the bleed will ALWAYS be clipped. Until the folks at Adobe give us the ability to define a bleed area for the artboard WITHIN Illustrator (much like the way InDesign allows you to define a bleed area in Document Setup), you'll have to use the workaround you've already mentioned in your question -- which is to enlarge your artboard (effectively increasing the TrimBox size).

- Illustrator has a bug in that it incorrectly sets the ArtBox to match the artboard size -- in other words, the TrimBox. In reality, the ArtBox should be your savior here -- if you had a way to place the ArtBox into InDesign, you'd be able to see even the art that appears off the artboard. Instead, the bug clips the art at the artboard because it uses the TrimBox setting. This bug has been present in Illustrator CS2 and now in Illustrator CS3 as well.

Great, so now that we're aware of the problem, what's the solution?

The solution is to save your file as a PDF file, not as an .ai file. Because when you save your file as a PDF, you have the ability to define a BleedBox. Choose File > Save As and choose Adobe PDF as the File Format. Then, in the PDF Options dialog, go to the Marks and Bleeds panel and define a Bleed area. In this way, your PDF file will contain a TrimBox (granted, the ArtBox will be the same size as the TrimBox due to the bug), but it will also include a BleedBox which will include objects that appear outside the artboard area granted those objects are at least partially on the artboard. If you keep the option "Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities" on when saving the PDF, you'll get a full native AI file within the PDF, allowing you reopen and fully edit the PDF in AI when necessary (it's basically the exact same thing as a native .ai file, but in reverse). The downside is that should you use Edit Original from InDesign to edit the file, the file will open in Acrobat, not Illustrator. So you'll need to manually open the file in AI to edit it.

When placing your Illustrator files into InDesign, check Show Import Options when placing your file (or better, just hold the Shift key while clicking the Place button in the Place dialog). You can then choose exactly WHICH PDF Box you want InDesign to use when placing your file. The preview can help you make sure you choose the right one. But obviously, in our case, you want to choose the Bleed option.



Moving forward, for all new files, I'm finding myself more and more moving away from the artboard size as being anything meaningful at all. Kind of the way Illustrator now creates a single huge artboard for Web documents (see this post for details), I do the same for print documents by creating an extremely large artboard, and I then use Crop Areas to define my document. In this way, I can toggle between the CropBox and BoundingBox place settings in InDesign to get what I want.

Naturally, I hope that Adobe realizes what a problem this is and that they fix all the bounding box issues with Illustrator and add a true bleed setting for CS4. If you think this issue is important to you and you share my concerns and hopes for this to be addressed in CS4, please sound off in the comments -- let this serve as a powerful petition to Adobe to fix this. Heck, fixing the ArtBox bug with a dot release in CS3 would be TOTALLY awesome as well.

Woz, I apologize for the long post, but I hope this gives you your answer (maybe not the one you were hoping for, but an answer nonetheless).

Illustrator is just "standard"

In today's world, we often spend much of our time comparing things, or trying to figure out who is best. In my home town (especially this coming weekend), the news is filled with Mets vs Yankees. Today's local newspaper dedicated two full pages to a position by position comparison of both teams, and who had the edge for each one. TV is filled with things like American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, and more. In the design community, we've spent years comparing Apple to Microsoft, Adobe to Macromedia, Syquest to Bernoulli, Type 1 to TrueType, PageMaker to Quark, Quark to InDesign, etc.

The latest "drama" to unfold is Adobe's announcement earlier this week, finally putting an end to the one thing that most people probably already knew anyway, but just didn't want to accept -- that FreeHand would not see another version.

While FreeHand users have never been silent in the past, when John Nack posted Adobe's intentions on his blog, FreeHand users once again have stepped up to defend their beloved program.

I do agree (quite strongly I might add) with one of John's statements. In response to those who claim Adobe "killed" FreeHand, John replies:

Well, you can blame Adobe, but not in the way you think: FH steadily lost market share to Illustrator, and Macromedia realized that rather than fight that uphill battle, they'd be better off funding other efforts. As far as I can tell, the FH codebase had been essentially dormant for 2.5 years before Adobe took ownership. So, blame Illustrator for surpassing FH in the market, leading to the current situation, but don't blame Adobe for not reviving a dormant app.

The reality is that Macromedia killed FreeHand way before Adobe even had the chance to do so. In fact, if I remember correctly, when I came on board as product manager for Illustrator in early 2001, FreeHand had 14% marketshare worldwide. At the time, I no longer considered FreeHand even as a competitor anymore, and instead saw older versions of Illustrator as competition instead (many users stuck with Illustrator 8 because of how fast it was and because it didn't have "transparency" issues at the time).

But as I mentioned before, we live in a world where we feel the need to compare things. And so, it's easy to say that FreeHand is better at this, or that Illustrator is better at that. There's no question that FreeHand has some great functionality, and that Adobe simply MUST consider moving much of that functionality over to Illustrator. But that's a discussion we can have at a different time. At present, I thought I'd take a different stand -- something which I think is more productive in the present -- because it can help users NOW (not in some unnamed versions in the future).

The reality is that many users are making a decision (either willfully or not) to make the move from FreeHand to Illustrator. While there are a handful of resources available to help people make that adjustment (some developed by yours truly), I thought I'd present five specific features that appear in Illustrator that have no equal (or aren't present at all) in FreeHand. In fact, I'll tell you that I rely on these five features quite heavily. And while I may miss a feature here or a feature there from FreeHand (I was a FreeHand user before I moved to Illustrator), the time lost because those features are not in Illustrator pale in comparison to how much time I now save because these five features are present in Illustrator today.

To make a point, I have chosen five features that are specifically NOT new in Illustrator CS3. The features I list here have been in Illustrator for at least two versions now, so I've come to rely on them heavily and can't possibly ever imagine giving them up for anything else -- even paste inside :)

To make an additional point, I've found that these specific features share an interesting theme -- as they are all build around standards. Standards are important, and most designers I know have to deal with many kinds of files with many kinds of demands and with many kinds of deadlines. And Adobe's commitment to standards throughout Illustrator (and all of it's other programs for that matter), have only helped me in my work.

While you can argue that it's easier to select objects in FreeHand, these are five things that I do in Illustrator many many times each day, and ultimately save more time in the end.

PDF

While it was only a few years ago that I was pulling matchprint proofs, color keys, and dye-sub prints for my clients, today it's all about PDF. And while I fondly remember the days of racing across the city to drop my camera-ready ad for a newspaper to the latest Fed-Ex drop off in the city, I don't even think twice now when I send my files via email or upload them to a printer's FTP site (remember trying to jam just one more Syquest cartridge into that fedex envelope?).

The reality is that Illustrator's support of PDF and the standards built on it (PDF/X) are something I simply could not live without. Whether I'm sending a quick proof to a client or creating a high-res PDF for press, I can rely on using Illustrator for that. And since Illustrator can also OPEN any PDF file, I have the ability to edit or use content that I once might have had to redraw on my own from scratch.

I create so many PDF files each day, and while you can certainly create PDF from FreeHand, you don't have NEAR the robust support that you would have in FreeHand. That's why support for the PDF standard is reason number one for why I can't look back.

OpenType

It wasn't pretty for Illustrator users when CS came around with its brand-new text engine. Migrating older files to the new version was painful, and for workflows that demanded moving files between CS and non-CS versions, a nightmare ensued. But there's no arguing that the modern Unicode-based text engine in Illustrator has made a world of difference in the work I do today. Better language support, better global support, and most importantly, better cross-platform support, means that files that I create can be used around the world, and likewise I can use files from almost anywhere.

I have clients with office around the world, and who need to create documents that people can read anywhere on any device. And Adobe support for the OpenType standard means that I can deliver that promise. It also means that I can incorporate the creative advantages of OpenType into my work. I used to spend my day trying to get documents with crazy fonts to work across multiple machines in my own offices and in my client's offices around the world. And I can't begin to explain how often I'd be on the phone with a client who claimed their PDF contained all these boxes on their screen where text was supposed to appear, when the file obviously looked perfectly fine on my screen. I can't go back there -- and so OpenType support (and Illustrator's professional-level typography in general) is reason number two for why I am not looking in the rear view mirror, but have my eyes firmly locked on the road ahead.

XMP

I'll admit that when Adobe first announced their support for the XMP standard, I thought it would only be interesting for huge businesses or news agencies (like the Associated Press). But here I am, publishing content and creating new files every day. My hard drive is filled with files that I create or update every day. And I work with others. And they have their hundreds and thousands of files. Metadata becomes increasingly more important.

On my own, I have also found myself publishing files and posting them for others to benefit from. With XMP I can store copyright information in my files. I can provide information above and beyond the content that appears within the file itself. And XMP metadata enables much more in the way of scripting, integration with digital asset management systems, and products like Adobe's Version Cue and the Adobe Stock Photos service. These days, I can't afford not to have this information, and probably couldn't function without XMP in most of my files. This is why XMP is reason number three (it rhymes).

Integration

So this is admittedly a broad category. I originally meant to label it as integration with the industry-standard application for photographic editing -- Adobe Photoshop. But then again, Illustrator is a best-of-class citizen when it comes to integration with almost all of the programs I use on a day to day basis. Illustrator has always excelled here, and besides for the ability to export layered PSD files with many items intact (layers, editable text, opacity, clipping masks, slices, etc.), you can of course also bring layered content with all that goodness from Photoshop back into Illustrator as well. Add After Effects to the list here, as I use that often enough. I am also holding back from mentioning Flash here -- only because Illustrator to Flash workflows were never pretty until CS3 came along (although in CS3, Illustrator to Flash integration is probably the best example of cross-product integration that I've ever seen between ANY product -- with the possible lone exception of the Dynamic Link feature found between After Effects and Premiere Pro).

I use so many applications every day and work on so many projects that I can't see limiting myself to trying to force one application to do it all. I use whatever I can have available to me at the time to get my work done, and Illustrator enables that. I can't imagine using anything else. Chalk integration up as the fourth reason for my loyalty to Illustrator.

Save for Web

I'm trying to think of a feature I use more often than Save for Web in Illustrator (it has been renamed Save for Web & Devices in CS3). I also could never believe that FreeHand never moved to offer this kind of functionality. In the world we live in today, I'm repurposing graphics all the time. Nothing gives me near the functionality that Save for Web does. One can argue that you can do all of that stuff in Photoshop, but the whole point is that I can get it done so quickly in Illustrator directly.

And it goes beyond just saving out a GIF or a JPEG here and there for a website. Clients need logos that appear in their proprietary database programs, wallpaper for their cell phones, icons for their digital displays in their windows, etc. I also use Save for Web to quickly crank out art for screenshots or for posting illustrations on my blog. Or for generating still frames for podcasts, movie clips, or animations. It's a workhorse, and it does SWF animations too. How can you beat that? A part of me died inside when Adobe lopped off ImageReady (the actual codebase for Save for Web), but for most of what I need on a daily basis, I need Save for Web. And that's reason number five.