Graphics look fine in InDesign, but they don’t when you make a PDF. This is often a problem with transparencies.

You have spent quite a bit of your time designing this nice brochure in InDesign. You have a drop shadow here, an image with transparency there and so on. It looks great in InDesign. Then you make a PDF from InDesign and white outlines show around that nice drop shadow or that image with transparent background. How do you handle that?

First of all print your document at the highest resolution you can print with your desktop printer. If the outlines are no longer there, you simply need to change a display setting in your Acrobat.

1. Go to the Preferences in Acrobat and click on the Smoothing tab (or Display for Acrobat 5). Then uncheck the Smooth line art option.

2. If the above doesn’t work, or if the white outline shows also when you print your job, then when you make your PDF choose Acrobat 5 compatibility (PDF 1.4). Beware that if you are going to print this with an offset press, your printer’s RIP should be Level 3 PostScript for the best results. Consult with your printer if you are not sure. As a guideline, if your printer can handle PDFs made directly from InDesign, without the use of Distiller, than he can probably handle Acrobat 5 compatible PDFs.

3. If your printer cannot handle Acrobat 5 compatible files, then you need to use a couple of workarounds. The first one is to place your text on a separate layer on top of your graphics. The second one is to use clipping paths to get rid of background from your images, instead of using Photoshop’s transparency.