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Answered

Yellow lines appear green, but only in Acrobate Reader

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
March 13, 2025
3 replies
1320 views

Hi,

I have a very strange problem. Our Software, ELCAD, can output drawings as PDF.
When I draw a rectangle in yellow, RGB FF FF 00, it appears green, but ONLY in Acrobate reader.
All other tools I tested (Irfanview, Thunderbird, Foxit, Firefox, Chrome and so on) display the PDF correctly.
AS our customer inists on using Acrobate, I have to find a solution.

In the umcompressed pdf (attached) I found the colour information
stream
1 J
1 j
1.000 1.000 0.000 rg
1.000 1.000 0.000 RG
This seems to be correct.

If I change all appearances to
0.000 1.000 0.000
the rectangle has the same green colour in all tools including Acrobate.

So only yellow is a problem, but why?

Can anyone help me?
Thanks in advance,
Br
Christian

Rectangle_Uncompressed_PDF.pdf

Correct answer MikelKlink

Wow, thanks, I never would have found that. Can you also tell me how to fix it in my source code?

If I simply uncomment the orange lines, the colour is displayed correctly but I get a conformance warning.

ISO 19005-1:2005

6.2.3

DeviceRGB may be used only if the file has a PDF/A-1 OutputIntent that uses an RGB colour space

print_ref ( "Metadata", pdf_catalog.metadata , 1 );

//sprintf(buffer,"/OutputIntents[<</Type/OutputIntent /S/GTS_PDFA1 /OutputConditionIdentifier (Custom) /DestOutputProfile %d 0 R>>] \n",pdf_catalog.outputIndents.nr );
//print_line ( buffer, 0 );

PDF/A requires that you have an OutputIntent if you use an uncalibrated color space. Thus, you will need to look out for an ICC profile (to put into your DestOutputProfile) with the characteristics you want.

Unfortunately I'm not really into that subject and cannot recommend anything.

JR Boulay

Community Expert

[MOVED TO THE ACROBAT READER DISCUSSIONS]

Acrobate du PDF, InDesigner et Photoshopographe

F

fariya_yousaf

Participant

Are you still facing the issue?

C

christian_1689Author

Participant

Yes.

MikelKlink

Participating Frequently

I could not reproduce your issue, here the rectangle is drawn in yellow color by Acrobat whether I zoom in or not.

One thing is interesting, though: In your screenshot "Rectangle Acrobate Reader.JPG" the rectangle appears yellow in Acrobat while in your screenshot "Same Green.JPG" the zoomed-in rectangle appears green in Acrobat:

What did you do differently there? Does the line become green while zooming? Or are the files "Rectangle.pdf" in the upper part and "Rectangle Uncompressed.pdf" in the lower part considerably different?

Or when you said

When I draw a rectangle in yellow, RGB FF FF 00, it appears green, but ONLY in Acrobate reader.

did you probably not mean actually green but merely yellow with a slight greenish tint?

That's due to the OutputIntent of your PDF (see the OutputIntents entry of the document Catalog). The information in such an OutputIntent can cause the colors to be transformed to match a certain profile.

I removed the OutputIntents entry in your PDF and compared the Acrobat display with and without that entry side-by-side:

In the upper part the "1.000 1.000 0.000 RG" due to the OutputIntent results in e0ff00 while in the lower part without OutputIntent you get ffff00.

C

christian_1689Author

Participant

Hi,

I opened the attached pdf file Rectangle Uncompressed PDF.pdf with Acrobate Reader Version 2025.001.20432 64 bit,

it looks like in the screenshot Rectangle Acrobate Reader.JPG. The rectangle's colour is a light green.

I opened the same pdf file with Foxit (or any other tool), the line is yellow, as it should be. This is screenshot Rectangel Foxit.JPG.

Then I changed the pdf file manually with notepad++ by replacing all apperances of 1.000 1.000 0.000 by

1.000 1.000 0.000 (which is green).

Then I opened the modified file with Acrobate Reader and Foxit, the screenshot Same Green.JPG shows both

applications, Acrobate on the left, Foxit on the right. Here the colours are exactly the same. So the problem seems to

appear only with yellow. I did this test to find out wether all colours are displayed wrong.

Zomming has no effect, I just zoomed to see the colour better.

MikelKlink

Participating Frequently

Ah, ok, so I originally misinterpreted the meaning of your screen shots, and the second idea I added as an afterthough to my answer above should explain the cause.

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