Printing PDF with hidden Layers

[ksander17]

I have 4 layers on my Illustrator document. I am hiding 2 of the layers for printing. I hide the layers in Illustrator in the layers tab and save as a PDF. When I open the PDF, everything looks fine. When I go to print the hidden layers magically appear. I don't inderstand why... In my attached screenshot of my laptop, you can see the document I want printed (with layers hidden) in the background and what it is trying to print. Please can someone help!

[Mylenium · Accepted solution]

Well, printing from a browser is never going to give you correct handling of these things. You need to download the file and use Acrobat/ Reader. "Dumb" PDF engines like the ones in Chrome or Firefox simply don't care for print-specific features like hiding layers or tagging obejcts as non-printable.

Mylenium

[David Beroff]

Maybe, @Mylenium .  I found out (the hard way) that the PDF rendering engine (in firmware) on some printers can also have issues with transparent layers.  After trying a few other solutions, I was able to "print" the PDF to another PDF file, and then use that for the actual printing.

[jasonryan]

 I came across this issue printed 20 copies before I saw that the printer prints hidden layers, nightmare

[Monika Gause]

 I came across this issue printed 20 copies before I saw that the printer prints hidden layers, nightmare

By @jasonryan

Have you solved it by now?

[David Beroff]

See my response above; it seemed to be a reasonable solution.

[jasonryan]

I dont use Layers in Illustrator, and Ill invest in Coreldraw in the future

[Monika Gause]

Everyone uses layers in Illustrator. It's not possible to work without them.

You can try and turn off "Save in background" in the preferences, then save again.

BTW: this ios a user forum. 96%  of people posting here are volunteers. If all you want to do is rant, go ahead, but maybe mark your post as a rant, so nobody wastes their time trying to help. 

[Bobby Henderson]

CorelDRAW won't save you from having to use layers to organize or isolate artwork elements. It's the same situation as Illustrator, just with different window dressing. Also, CorelDRAW (IMHO) doesn't output PDF as good as Illustrator, even with some PDF-specific features updated in their past couple of releases. One example: any gradient fills with varying levels of transparency will be rasterized in PDF files output from CorelDRAW. Free-form gradients and gradients on line strokes aren't supported in CorelDRAW.

Regarding hidden layers and transparent layers, those are pretty different things. Layers with visibility turned off in Illustrator shouldn't print. Certain rival applications require the user to cross out the printer on a specific layer to prevent a hidden layer from printing. As for visible yet transparent content on a layer, quite a few printers can have difficult properly printing such content. The same goes for content in clipping masks and clipping groups. The key thing is having a printer or RIP application that has an Adobe Certified PDF Print Engine. That's the best way to avoid things like yucky discolored box syndrome in printed output.