Transparency in Acrobat / Preview / Indesign / PDF

Report · Sep 09, 2018

I have a question concerning Acrobat Reader DC and the Preview App (Mac Sierra)

I was exporting a PDF for print from Adobe Indesign. When opening in the Preview App I am seeing color-changes in the transparent areas of the embedded TIFFs. When opening the same document in Adobe Acrobat (Reader & Pro) I do not see any color-changes in the transparent areas.

Is this a bug in the Preview App or is something in the export-/ color-settings of Indesign not the way it should be?

This is how the document looks in Preview:

This is how the document looks in Acrobat (Reader DC & Pro 8):

If someone has an idea what this is about, it would be a great help to know...

Thanks in advance!

S

Report · Sep 09, 2018

Preview doesn't actually have a PDF viewer. It uses the built in PDF viewer in Mac OS. Which, indeed, has lots of bugs.

Report · Sep 09, 2018

Okay, good to know! I guess that means that I should not be worried about sending the file to the printer if it gets shown correctly in all other applications?

Report · Sep 10, 2018

If your printer uses Preview, look for a new one...

Report · Sep 10, 2018

lol... thanks for that, made my day

For sure my printer is not using Preview to print my data, but I was concerned that something in the printing-file could be improved so that even Preview could be showing the print-data correctly. I was also suspecting that an error in displaying the data in Preview could point to some kind of color-profile problem inside the Indesign-file.

Last not least I'm usually sending my print-data for confirmation to the clients, so they are mostly using "Preview", because it's convenient, and it's just difficult to explain that a visual error in the preview will not be printed on paper. Guess I will send jpegs together with the PDF from now...

Anyway: thanks for your help, I'm more relaxed about the data now.

Cheers, S