2023

Table Of Contents
User Guide | 571
Working with trapping
Now, overprints and knockout controls are available in the Colors palette.
Understanding flattening and production issues
Flattening is the process of simulating transparency by altering page elements
to produce the intended design. Flattening occurs only in the output stream —
as items are fed to the print engine, or exported to PDF — so your QuarkXPress
layouts are never actually modified. In QuarkXPress, flattening works as follows.
First, boxes are decomposed, transparent elements are identified, and
relationships between discrete shapes (including text outlines) are
deconstructed. Regions that do not have to be rasterized are filled with a new
color that is created by merging existing colors. (None and 0% opacity areas do
not need to be flattened except when used for gradients and pictures.)
Regions that need to be rasterized result in clipping paths. (Semi-opaque
pictures, drop shadows, semi-opaque blends, and semi-opaque items that
overlap page elements must be rasterized.)
The settings in the Transparency pane of the Print dialog box (File menu) control
the output resolution of page elements that are rasterized due to transparency
effects or drop shadows. For more information, see “Transparency pane.”
In general, when working with transparency relationships, trapping is not
necessary.
If color fonts are applied with transparency, then to increase the flattening
resolution use the Transparent Objects in Imported PDF & AI Files flattening
resolution option.
When exporting a PDF, you can choose whether to flatten items that are in
transparency relationships or to use native PDF transparency. If you export a
PDF with native PDF transparency, vector graphics in transparency
relationships remain in vector format. This can result in faster output and
make color management easier. Most modern workflows benefit from
exporting unflattened transparency. The ideal and recommended format is a
PDF/X-4.
PDF
The Print and Pre-Press industry has widely adopted the ISO standard PDF to
exchange files.
With QuarkXPress you can: