Horizontal stripes when images pasted into Pages

[Doctor Q]

I found an odd bug while printing a Pages '09 document to PDF. Attached are screenshots of my test document in Pages and the resulting PDF in Preview after I printed the Pages document to a PDF.

My test document has three images, all starting from the same png file and all intended to have the text flow around their edges. They look fine in Pages. But when I print the document or print the document to PDF, the first and third images come out looking fine but the middle image has horizontal stripes through it.

• The first image is the original, copied from Photoshop and pasted into Pages.
• The second image is a cropped oval from the image, with a transparent background, also copied/pasted.
• The third image is the same as the second, but I saved it out of Photoshop and imported it into Pages (menu choice Insert -> Choose rather than Edit -> Paste).

My conclusion is that the image corruption occurs only when both conditions are met:

1. The image is nonrectangular.
2. The image is pasted, not inserted.

It drove me crazy until I figured out what conditions were causing it.

At least I now know the workaround:

• If you have a nonrectangular image and don't need the text to wrap around it, fill the image background with white (or whatever background color your Pages document has) so the image becomes a rectangle. Then insert it or paste it.
• If you have a nonrectangular image and need the text to wrap around it, insert it rather than pasting it.

It's a bother when I have a lot of different shapes to paste into a document (for example, snowflakes created in Photoshop), but I've learned that I have to save each one to a file and then insert it from the file.

I'm at a loss to explain why this combination of factors produces a problem. Does anybody know why this happens? Why is pasting different than importing? Why does the corrupted image show up when printing to PDF but not when displayed in Pages? And why does the shape of the image matter?

 

[GGJstudios]

It appears the problem may lie with Adobe:

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=9079867
http://forums.adobe.com/message/1259794
http://printplanet.com/forums/enfocus/14208-white-lines-pdf
https://www.createspace.com/en/community/thread/3557

 

[MacTech68]

I'll stick my neck out and ponder:

Copy/Paste would be a QuickTime operation, whereas Choose--File would be an operation the App itself performs.

If you have another System that you can change the version of QuickTime on, that would be where I'd start. I don't always recommend updating an otherwise stable system as you might run into problems elsewhere. You could even try a clean system, and not update QuickTime.

What system version and QuickTime version are you using?

But looking at the forum posts GGJstudios provided, this has been around for some time.

What happens if the cropped oval is on a white background, rather than transparent?

Sometimes a workaround is easier (since you've already found one) than finding the root cause.

 

[Doctor Q]

I'll stick my neck out and ponder:

Copy/Paste would be a QuickTime operation, whereas Choose--File would be an operation the App itself performs.

If you have another System that you can change the version of QuickTime on, that would be where I'd start. I don't always recommend updating an otherwise stable system as you might run into problems elsewhere. You could even try a clean system, and not update QuickTime.

What system version and QuickTime version are you using?

An interesting theory. I'm on Mac OS X 10.5.8, QuickTime 7.6.6.

What happens if the cropped oval is on a white background, rather than transparent?

Then it's a rectangle to the software and it works fine. But I can't wrap the text to the edges of the oval so that's a suitable workaround only when I don't need wrapping.

It appears the problem may lie with Adobe:

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=9079867
http://forums.adobe.com/message/1259794
http://printplanet.com/forums/enfocus/14208-white-lines-pdf
https://www.createspace.com/en/community/thread/3557

I did another test and found that the image is NOT corrupted when I print directly to the printer from Pages, only when I print to PDF and then print the PDF, so blaming Adobe makes sense. I clarified my first post.

 

[MacTech68]

I'm curious, what happens if the image is rectangular with a transparent "hole" in it. Not what you're trying to achieve but I'm wondering if it's the transparency layer that's causing the problem.

Secondly, doesn't Pages have a method to crop to an irregular shape (oval) AFTER pasting an image, enabling text wrapping? I don't use pages myself, but I'm sure I've seen SJ do this in keynote addresses.

Thirdly, I imagine that once the oval shape has been copy/pasted, the error that produces the pdf printing white lines is already there, since as you've determined, that's where the difference in reproducing the error lies (if that makes sense).

The reason the error doesn't show up when printing directly to the printer from Pages may have more to do with the print driver's scatter printing and anti aliasing.

BTW, when you're printing to PDF, I assume you mean using Apple's built-in PDF rendering engine. This is still Apple code, even if it is licensed from Adobe.