Transparency in FrameMaker 11

Question

I am placing a shape (from either Illustrator CS6 or Photoshop CS6) with a transparent background and it shows up with a white background over the colored frame underneath. Is there a format I can use that will maintain the transparency?

~Barb

Dov Isaacs · Accepted Answer

Hey Van, thank you for responding. (And thank you to Jeff, Arnis, Peter and Mike!) I did set the fill afterwards, and thought that was conveyed by the screen shot above, showing the selected frame with the transparency settings in the Graphics Toolbar. I'm going to give up on this one for now, and submit "transparency support in native .psd and .ai files" (like we've had in InDesign for years) as a feature request for FM 12.

~barb

We should be very careful here to differentiate between transparency (i.e., objects that are not 100% opaque) and backgrounds (the fill color of non-occupied areas of either native or imported content).

FrameMaker never has supported live transparency, but depending upon the type of the graphic object imported, either no background or a user-specified background color may be used. For certain image formats, such as TIFF or PNG, transparency and clipping are one and the same and as such, transparency of any type, including clipping, of TIFF and PNG images is ignored by FrameMaker. Transparency in PDF is flattened into 100% opaque objects as the PDF is internally converted to EPS (Encapsulated PostScript).

I personally would not get your hopes up about any support for live transparency in FrameMaker. That would require an entire change of the internal imaging model of FrameMaker from PostScript-centric to PDF 1.4-centric. If your graphics needs include really graphically-rich content, you may need to consider InDesign as a better alternative (yes, I know it doesn't support all the structured stuff that FrameMaker supports, yet!).

- Dov

Mike Wickham · Answer

FrameMaker doesn't do full transparency, but it is possible to place an

opaque object and have the background go transparent. There is no way to

place a graphic and have whatever is behind it show through and blend

with the object. In other words, you can't place a transparent red

circle on a yellow page and expect the circle to turn orange. But you

can place a red circle and have text run around it.

If the fill=none trick doesn't work, try creating a clipping mask in

Photoshop for an EPS file. If I recall correctly, that does work, but FM

won't display the transparency. That is, FM will still show the white

box background, but the PDF will not.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded