Black backgrounds appearing when printing in color

Question

Hi everyone, I'm not sure whether this is an issue with Adobe Acrobat or InDesign or neither, so I may crosspost this question.

I have created a brochure for a client, but when he tries to print it on his home computer, all of the transparent images from the brochure show up with black backgrounds. I used PNGs in RGB format originally (I had never had this issue before) so I replaced all of the transparents PNGs with transparent PDFs in CYMK format instead and the issue persists.

The odd thing is that when he prints the document in black and white, the black backgrounds do not show up, and the document looks fine. The issue only shows up when he prints in color.

The issue does NOT happen on my computer. I can print the document in color just fine with no issues.

Here is a picture of the issue:

Document Geek · Answer

That looks to me to be a print from a desktop inkjet printer. I suspect that his printer doesn't have the capability to deal with transpareency very well. Try exporting the a flattened PDF (Acrobat 5.0).

On a totally unrelated note, if you use Optical Margin alignment (in the InDesign Story panel) for the quotes in the blue bar on the left, your quotes will be outdented to the left just a touch and make those text blocks look a little tidier.

That may fix the problem.

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