Any printing professionals can answer? Does changing an Illustrator document with gradients to a tiff solve?

Question

the problem of printing with gradients? I have a document full of gradients that is a label and I am now upset at the prospect of having to redo the whole document and try to understand all of the printing issues. Can anyone help with a work around?

Answer 1

How are you having it printed and what's the problem? Are you getting stepping in the gradient? What version of illustrator are you using?



Vector graphics are usually better than a tiff or photoshop eps file. It should give you a pretty smooth gradient. The only time a problem sometimes occurrs with using gradients is when you are using a mesh sometimes it won't print correctly or if you are using layer effects like overlay or multiply or transparencies.



If you are getting stepping you can try to adjust the sliders in your location slightly to try and get a better and smoother transition.

Answer 2

This is a big topic, and one more angle, make sure that your output device supports PostScript data. Native Illustrator and InDesign files contain PostScript code. If you print to a device that doesn't support PostScrpit code or use a RIP that does so, then this could easily be the issue. The way around that is indeed to flatten the file with sufficient resolution (.tiff or .jpg for example), but the resulting file will be larger and a tad harder to work with.

Answer 3

Illustrator is adrawing package, which means it effectively keeps the document as a series of lines, etc. A tiff is a bitmap image file format, so it keeps the doucment as a pixel image. To change from an Illustrator to a tiff you will usually export the document/image when it will be converted to a bitmap.



You will need to specify the resultant dots per inch or dots per centimetre you need to convert it to. As a rough rule of thumb, if you want to print it real size, then you should convert it to RGB at 200 dots per inch (dpi) or 80 dots per centimetre (80dpc) for most printers (do not confuse this with the number of dots per inch your printer will do e.g.1440dpi, etc.).



You amy also be given the option to use "Export selected only" which you should use if you don't want the whole page exported (select only what you want, especially if the label is only small compared to a full page) and anti-aliasing if an option should possibly want to be on.



This subject is much bigger than this answer. Feel free to contact me.