PDF - Patterns Fills become black lines

[mpkeane]

I am working on a Mac 10.4.11 with both VW 12.5 and VW 2008. They both have the same problem, which is that all Patterns inserted as Fills corrupt into thick black lines when I print on Kinko's large and small printers.

1) I made a test sheet with various boxes infilled with Patterns, Hatches (by Modify) and Hatches (by Attribute)

2) I exported those as PDFs at 300 dpi (one at 8.5" x 11" and one at 24" x 36")

3) Both PDFs look fine on screen with Adobe Reader

4) Printing 8.5 x 11 PDF on the Epson Workforce inkjet printer in my office is fine for Patterns and Hatches

5) At Kinkos, they use Windows XP and Adobe 8 to print

6) On the Kinkos BW Xerox printer, color Xerox printer, and large format plotter, both types of Hatches print well but all Patterns corrupt and become thick black lines.

Any idea what is going wrong with printing Patterns?

Tried turning off Quartz Imaging and remaking PDFs to no avail.

All for now.

Marc

[islandmon]

Try>Export to PDF ... and un-check > "Export patterns at on-screen resolution"

[mpkeane]

Thanks islandmon

I will give that a try and make some print outs at Kinkos.... see what happens. I'll let you know.

I can't imagine every Mac has this problem consistently (it's a major problem). I wonder what it is about my machine/software/etc that is buggy?

All for now.

Marc

[mpkeane]

Hello islandmon;

I didn't get as far as Kinkos. I exported new PDFs of my pattern test page. Those with "Export patterns at on-screen resolution" CHECKED printed fine on my Epson inkjet printer. For those with "Export patterns at on-screen resolution" UNCHECKED, the Hatches were OK but all the Patterns became simple grey tones. Not thick black lines (like the problem at Kinko's) but not the proper patterns either. Instead of the correct pattern (wavy lines or sand patterns or diagonal lines etc) with "Export patterns at on-screen resolution" UNCHECKED everything became simple halftone patterns.

My guess is printing on Kinkos various large and small format printers won't be better.

(I tried some tests with Quartz imaging ON and some OFF. Same result both ways. Unchecking "Export patterns at on-screen resolution" makes things worse on my office printer)

All for now.

Marc