Shape Transparancies in Visio 2007

[Mazen]

Hi,

I have been facing issues with applying transparencies in Visio, as the
prints made do not come out good at all. I depend on Transparancies in
placing a number of objects on top of one another but still be able to see
through them. This problem becomes especially severe when you have a raster
image underneath the transparent vector shapes, or when you have a number of
transparent objects on top of one another.

For example, say I have a yellow circle with 75% transparency representing
the area covered by a camera, with the circle placed on top of a Google
Earth-extracted image representing an aerial shot of a street. I need to use
the transparency and not just a no-fill circle.

On the screen it looks and works great, but once you print it to PDF or
paper, it's just extremely slow to regenerate and the output is not good at
all. The PDFs (even when generated) become extremely slow to draw on screen
and prohibitively slow to print.

I've used Adobe PDF printer and Doro PDF printer, and have tried all the
settings possible with them. These two printers work great otherwise.

Any ideas?

Thanks, and please keep up the good work.

 

[Paul Herber]

Hi,

I have been facing issues with applying transparencies in Visio, as the
prints made do not come out good at all. I depend on Transparancies in
placing a number of objects on top of one another but still be able to see
through them. This problem becomes especially severe when you have a raster
image underneath the transparent vector shapes, or when you have a number of
transparent objects on top of one another.

For example, say I have a yellow circle with 75% transparency representing
the area covered by a camera, with the circle placed on top of a Google
Earth-extracted image representing an aerial shot of a street. I need to use
the transparency and not just a no-fill circle.

On the screen it looks and works great, but once you print it to PDF or
paper, it's just extremely slow to regenerate and the output is not good at
all. The PDFs (even when generated) become extremely slow to draw on screen
and prohibitively slow to print.

I've used Adobe PDF printer and Doro PDF printer, and have tried all the
settings possible with them. These two printers work great otherwise.

Any ideas?

Thanks, and please keep up the good work.

Try this as a test.
Save your page as a PNG file, then load this PNG into a graphics
editor (I used PaintShop Pro) and export as PDF from there. What a
difference. Not only is it fast but the fill colours work as well. (I
also used PDF995)

 

[Mazen]

Hey Paul,

This really gives good results as a workaround. There is a huge difference
and now at least the images look like what they were intended to look like.
However, it's not a solution to the problem, wouldn't you say?
I mean, if you're using Visio for production, you can't really do that with
every drawing.
But thank you. It's good to know and I will be using it.