I am working remotely with a client; deliverable product is supposed to be a printable PDF.
The problem: The design has a colored background, and over this, an image with transparency. On screen and on my home printer, everything looks perfect. However when my client prints it out, she reports that the transparency isn't right and that a faint box (background) around the image is showing up. This happened for her on two different printers. It's not fully white or solid, just lighter than it should be.
I'm having a hard time troubleshooting because I can't reproduce the problem. My printer handles it fine. Things I have tried:
- Changing the linked image type. I have made transparent .psd, .tif, and .png versions in Photoshop and linked them into InDesign, all with the same result. In all cases choosing the least amount of compression possible.
- Embedding the linked image. Didn't help.
- Changing the Transparency Blend Space back and forth from RGB to CMYK. Didn't help.
- Changing the Transparency Flattener Preset to High Resolution.
- Changing the version of Acrobat compatibility from 5 to 7.
- Changing Adobe PDF Preset from High Quality Print to Smallest File Size.
- Changing Export Layers back and forth from Visible to Visible & Printable.
- Adding PDF/X-1a:2001 standard to the export criteria
I am at my wits' end, I don't know what else to try, since I can't even make it happen. Client reports that she CAN force the document to print correctly by choosing "print as image," which leads me to suspect the issue might lie in how different printers are interpreting the file's transparency. Advice appreciated; I'd like it to work on all printers.