Dear list, our book is getting ever more ready to be sent to the printers. They told me they would prefer PDF/X-4 but they can also handle PDF/X-3 and some other formats.
I am using Scribus scribus-1.5.3.svn-snapshot-170430-x64.exe on Windows 10 pro because 1.5.3 is handling our local language much better than any previous Scribus-version (we have tone-marks on top of special vowels, which used to float away from their host-vowel). Our book will have one colour-file for the cover, printed on the outside only. No problem so far. And then some 200+ A5 inside-pages in black/white only. A text-frame on each page. A master page with the page-number at the bottom. And most pages carry one or two nice black/white line drawings from a professional illustrator from Sweden. We are using three layers for text/illustrations/captions. Those illustrations were sent to us as .tif files, as far as I can tell no alpha-channels involved. I can edit these files maybe but I cannot order different ones. The layout is almost complete for the inside-pages. But when I try opening the PDF-export in Adobe Acrobat Reader (2017 release, version 2017.009.20044), I get the error message "There was an error processing a page. Invalid Transparency Group". When I open the PDF in the Windows app called "Reader" I get no error message and all pages open properly and are looking correct, including the illustrations. Next I tried exporting to PDF 1.5 instead of PDF/X-4 and I am getting the same error message from Acrobat Reader: "There was an error processing a page. Invalid Transparency Group". I have googlet this error message and have had a single hit in Russian from 2008. I found many pages explaining general stuff about transparency and PDF. So where in my export-file do I have problematic transparency? If we had Adobe Acrobat, I could use "List transparent objects" in the Preflight tool. But our project is mainly open-source (not least for budget reasons but also so that other local projects in African can use our templates and our methods). Does any user know how to check our files for "forbidden transparency" with an open-source tool? Or can you give me hints what/where in my Scribus document is creating those bad transparencies. For legal reasons, I cannot send the entire file, but I could send a sample-export of a few pages; I tried with the first 8 pages only and got the same error. Background: We have published with previous Scribus versions for years. We always used PDF-exports for printing; both on our own laser-printers and also commercially in Africa on plastic-sheets in digital printouts and in Germany for professional digital printing on paper. So far we never had any error messages and we never had "broken" PDF files; all prints always looked fine. Could this be a side-effect of using 1.5.3? Any help is welcome, time flies..., thanks, Martin -- ZASKE Martin responsable G?G? BP 50 - Bassila - B?nin tel G?G? 66.66.11.11 tel pers 97.44.62.95
