Printing messing up my poster

[nforeojc]

Has anyone encountered a problem like this? It looks fine as a pdf, but when my school publisher prints them out, they get messed up and has these purple lines. It even looks bad on the print preview, but when they open it on the same computer they print it from, it looks fine. The posters are made in Illustrator, I'm used to working in photoshop, but I'm trying to be a real designer now

[Monika Gause]

What kind of file exactly do you give them?

[nforeojc]

I give them a .pdf file, and it looks fine on the computer in the .pdf viewer, but not in the print preview

[Monika Gause]

So when they open the PDF it is fine?

And when they print it, it's not?

If the PDF is fine in Acrobat and the preflight produces no errors,  then the PDF is fine.

Everything else is their problem and you cannot solve it, because it's either their RIP or their printer that is causing issues.

They should tell you their requirements for the PDF. You're in Europe, so this should be either PDF/X-4 or PDF/X-1 and whatever color profile they prefer, ISO Coated v2 300 maybe. If they are not able to tell you anything about the PDF, I would send them PDF/X-1.

https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/analyzing-documents-preflight-tool-acrobat.html

[Luke_Jennings]

My guess is the purple lines and other unwanted elements are on Illustrator layers that are turned off. These layers might still exist on the saved PDF, but ordinarily they won't print or appear on screen. They might print and appear in the print preview if the PDF is opened in a viewer that does not recognize layers, such as a browser. If this is the case, you have done nothing wrong, and your printer needs to print your PDF from Acrobat or Reader.

You can remove the turned-off layers when saving as a PDF by deselecting the option Create Acrobat Layers from Top-Level Layers in the save-as dialog, although this is normally not necessary.

Edit: A PDF saved with the option Create Acrobat Layers from Top-Level Layers in the save-as dialog will appear to have only one layer when inspected in Acrobat (or printed from a browser), however the turned-off layer will still appear when the PDF is opened in Illustrator. So if you really want to get rid of that unwanted layer, (possibly for security reasons) your best option is to delete it in Illustrator before saving as PDF, or deselect the option Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities.