KB78625757: ArtPro - PDF generated by ArtPro does not appear to be correct when viewed in Acrobat

Summary

When viewing a PDF for Press that was generated by ArtPro in Adobe^® Acrobat^® or when printing a proof from this PDF, certain elements like images seem to be missing. This can happen when the overprint preview in Adobe^® Acrobat^® is disabled.

Symptoms

Data appears to be missing in the output when viewed in Adobe^® Acrobat^® (with overprint preview disabled) and on the Proof print, while this data is available in the ArtPro file.

This will typically happen when the ArtPro file contains placed ArtPro files (e.g.: in a Step & Repeat file) and has more separations than the placed files individually have (e.g.: additional separations in the Step & Repeat file that are not used in the one-ups).

When viewing or proofing a PDF (for Press), a conversion to CMYK is done (as a printer does not print spot colors), with the result that certain data can be missing. When the PDF is actually sent to a RIP and printed on a press, the result will be okay.

How to check if the result is okay without having to print this?

Solution

• The only way to viewing PDFs for press correctly is to use a viewer that is capable of showing overprint. In Adobe^® Acrobat^® or Adobe^® Reader^®,  you can enable this in the Preferences: in the Page Display section, set Use Overprint Preview to Always.

• If for some reason or another, overprint preview cannot be enabled, and/ or you want to print proofs: Use ArtPro 12.1.1 or newer to create a PDF in the "for Viewing" flavor. In most cases, the image data will then be visible again in Adobe^® Acrobat^® and on Proof Print, even without overprint preview.

  Do still create a PDF in the "for Press" flavor to send to the RIP or print on press. The "for Viewing" flavor is not optimized for that purpose.
• In a few cases, overprint cannot be avoided. For those cases, an informational message will be shown in the Message Center in the next version of ArtPro.