Is it safe to let illustrator Pattern print by print company or do I need to expand appearance.

Question

I recently started doing a lot of designs with pattern fills in illustrator.

One of my clients printed one of my Pdf´s using a laserprinter service and when he shared pictures of the final models (paper toys) parts of the pattern were simply missing. I had done dozens of test prints and never had any issues.

I am now wondering if it is safe to send designs including patterns to a digital printing service.
I have sent all the files with patterns expanded but linework feels clumsier or thicker than intended in my testprints. This all confuses me as I thought it should be all the same.

So what is the best practice here. Sending all patterns as expanded artwork or should I leave them as patterns and exporting to Pdf should work.
Can anybody share their experience?

Thank you
Cheers to all
M

itsBenMason · Answer

Morning,

I would suggest expanding them, mainly due to you and the printer possibly having different settings selected and what not.

One example is that you could have 'Transform Pattern Tiles' enabled, allowing you to move the design without anything changing. Your printer could have this setting disabled and so the background has a possibility of changing if they were to move the design into a template.

When sending off artwork, its best to just make everything as least prone to changes as possible - outlining text, embeding images, expanding patterns, etc.

If you wanted to clean up the outline preview, you can expand strokes and use the pathfinder buttons, lil video down below.

https://imgur.com/a/4NmQfub

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