Expert: InDesign Pro - 9/21/2007

Question
I'm using (reluctantly) InDesign CS3 on a Mac G5 running OSX 10.4.9. I'm
trying to make upo a document which has a graduated background running
horizontally from white to 100%, overlaid with text and TIF images.
Everything looks fine on screen, but when I print it to our Xerox 5000 via
Creo Spire RIP, I get large (and intersecting) rectangles of white in the
background. Sending it to a Xerox242 with Creo Lite RIP produced a slightly
better result: boxes weren't white but a paler veriosn of the background
gradient. None of the boxes bear any relation to the image or text boxes
overlying the background, though *one* image box did ahve transparency
applied to it. Anyone got any ideas as to why I'm getting this cr*p?

Answer
Hi Keren, thanks for the question.

Unfortunately, working with gradients, transparencies and overlaid text and graphics can be frustrating. I'm not sure how big your page is, but what you might want to do is make your gradient in Photoshop so that it will be a raster-based image rather than InDesign PostScript gradient. It's going to add to your RIP processing time and file size, but in the end it might solve your problem. I would also make sure to overprint your text using the Attributes palette in InDesign so it's not trying to knock-out in the RIP. You have to make sure to select the text and not just the text block before choosing Overprint Fill.

One other tip is to add a small bit of noise to your gradients in Photoshop to even out banding problems.

Hope this helps, good luck.