Word to PDF distiller.

October 16, 2004 12:25 PM

Word to PDF Distortion Filter
I'm distilling a bunch of Word Files which contain tables, over which I am superimposing "semi-transparent" light gray text boxes. When these pages are distilled, the resulting .PDF displays the gray text boxes as "varigated," i.e., having bands of light and dark gray.

Does any kind stranger know if there is some setting I can adjust to make this go away? Thanks!
posted by ParisParamus to computers & internet (4 comments total)

What quality/type of compression are your defaults set at? The first thing I might try is varying those - try a high or maximum quality if it's set too low.

Also, are you making a .pdf directly from word or are you using distiller to create a .ps file, then outputting that as a .pdf? I find that when I do the latter (a pain in the ass, generally) it often fixes problems I can't track down. Obviously that may not be feasible if you're outputting a ton of stuff.
posted by jalexei at 12:51 PM on October 16, 2004

Nope. Turned the compression completely off; also turned "smooth grays" on. tinker tinker tinker. The problem disappears when the transparency setting in turned off...tinker tinker tinker...
posted by ParisParamus at 2:07 PM on October 16, 2004

Aren't you a mac user, Paris? I thought it was trivial to print to PDF in macs, since the display's based on PDF?
posted by kenko at 4:19 PM on October 16, 2004

Kenko, I'm actually referring to something that is visible on the screen; and prints as well. I'm just leaning towards turning off the "transparency" feature.
posted by ParisParamus at 8:09 PM on October 16, 2004