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Edward Mendelson
Participating Frequently
July 21, 2021
Question

How to remove hidden lines that display in Acrobat but not in Chrome, etc.?

  • July 21, 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 8485 views

I've been creating some PDFs by printing from the old (1996-era) Envoy viewer to PDF. In many of the graphic images on the resulting pages, there are hidden lines (I'm not sure of the exact terminology) that do not display in the original Envoy viewer, and do NOT display when I open the PDF in Chrome or Firefox or macOS Preview, but which are visible when I open the PDF in Acrobat. Here is a sample (attached). The lines seem to be there because they were parts of triangles that were supposed to have two sides hidden and only one side visible.

 

Is there any way to process the PDF to remove those extra lines? I've tried various export options, without success. I realize that there may simply be no solution to this, but I hope that one of the experts here might possibly have an answer.

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2 replies

Brad @ Roaring Mouse
Community Expert
Brad @ Roaring MouseCommunity Expert
Community Expert
July 29, 2021

I'm wondering if it's the driver you are using to print to PDF. How are you doing this?

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Edward MendelsonAuthor
Participating Frequently
July 29, 2021

I've tried Adobe, a half-dozen GhostScript-based drivers, some CUPS-based drivers, CutePDF, NitroPDF, and a few others; a friend tried some OS/2 drivers. The results are always the same.

Luke Jennings3
Community Expert
Luke Jennings3Community Expert
Community Expert
July 21, 2021

I can see the thin lines in Acrobat & Illustrator, unfortunately, they are composed of very thin filled shapes (not lines or strokes) therefore they are not easy to remove. Selecting by same fill in Illustrator results in selecting other wanted elements. Also, the fonts are not embedded and there are odd color changes when the file is opened in Illustrator. Is there an option to export to PDF from Envoy Viewer? What is the original file type?

Have you tried opening the original file in Acrobat?

E
Edward MendelsonAuthor
Participating Frequently
July 21, 2021

Many thanks for those further details. The original file type was .EVY - an Envoy file. Tumbleweed's (later Novell's) Envoy was a rival product to Acrobat and did not have PDF export - it was designed an alternative to PDF, to be viewed only in the Envoy viewer or in a runtime executable that had the Viewer built in. The Envoy file was created in 1994, so probably in Windows 3.11 or in something like Ventura Publisher (though I don't know whether Ventura could be output to Envoy). Tumbleweed never made a full EVY-file editor available to the public, so there's no way to edit the original file.

 

What you say means that there's almost certainly no way to fix this, but I'm grateful to you for trying. One thing I do wonder about is why the shapes don't appear in non-Acrobat viewers: do the other viewers simply ignore lines that are as thin as these?

 

Again, thank you for confirming and clarifying!

Luke Jennings3
Community Expert
Luke Jennings3Community Expert
Community Expert
July 22, 2021

And PS: the only software that opens EVY files is the Envoy viewer. Acrobat doesn't recognize it.


I have two suggestions, the easy way would be to take a screen shot of the original file open in Envoy viewer, then open the screen shot in Acrobat and save it as a PDF. If you need maximun quality, and have the time, here is the hard way;

1. Open the PDF in Acrobat and use a preflight profile to embed the fonts (Tools> Print Production> Preflight> Fixups> Embed fonts).

2. Use another preflight to separate the text, vector & images into layers (Preflight> Fixups> Layers> Create different layers for vector, text, image).

3. Turn off the layer visibility of the image and text layers by clicking the eyeball icon in the Acrobat layers panel and open the PDF in Photoshop, save it as a tiff (I used 300 dpi in my example, you can go higher if needed) retouch or erase the unwanted thin lines and save.

4. Open the layered PDF and from the layers fly-out menu, select Import as layer, navigate to the retouched tiff and create a new layer, save.

5. Create an InDesign page and place the layered PDF, Then place it a second time. Select the top PDF and go to Object> Layer options, turn off the original vector layer, set the transparency to multiply.

6. Set the object layer options of the bottom PDF to show the retouched layer only, save, export to a new PDF.

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