[InDesign] Drop shadow with pixels…

These threads might be of interest:

InDesign CS6 Drop Shadow Pixelated

Transparency without Flattening

InDesign doesn't show a shadow effect at full export resolution. Here's ID on the left and PDF/X-4 on the right both zoomed to 1200%

why not using vectors instead?

It looks like your drop shadow's Size and Spread are set to 0 (there's no blur), so in this case you could make a "vector shadow" by duplicating and offsetting the text

Hi Nicholas,

I guess the impact of the "pixels" you are seeing is very small when it comes to PDF export and offset printing.

You could try to change the values of resolution with the used transparency reduction setting when exporting to PDF/X-1a or PDF/X-4*. But I guess that's a mute point. You will only do this to satisfy an automatic preflight that is ejecting false positives for errors around image resolution with the printing company.

* Yes, transparency reduction settings of the spread or the document can make a difference even when exporting to PDF/X-4!

Here an example where I prepared a PDF/X-4 export preset with a transparency reduction set for rendering special effects like drop shadows to 600 ppi  ( I hope, you get the settings despite my German version ):

Here in my export preset the settings for transparency reduction are grayed out. You will change that temporarily by changing the PDF/X standard from X-4 to X-1a, changing the settings and switch the standard back to X-4:

The impact on this can be seen in Acrobat Pro's preflight:

So in effect the drop shadow now has a resolution of 600 ppi.

But to be honest, even a resolution of 150 ppi will print fine in this case.

As I said, this is just done to satisfy a dump automatic preflight with the printing company that will alert images below effective 250 ppi maybe…

Regards,
Uwe

What PDF export settings are you using?