Do picture boxes with TIFFs have to have a white background?
Rob writes:
I have been researching the print production sites for some time now and I always get different answers to the same questions.
For example, some say when importing a cmyk tiff into a picture box in Quark it has to have a background of none, some say white? Also does the picture box have to have a runaround of none or item in order to avoid output promlems?
The answer to your first question is: yes, always set the background of tiffs to white. Why? Because of jaggies.
Remember that a tiff can have transparency... if your tiff has white pixels, or light areas that fade to white, or sharp edges that end in white, then Quark may set the white pixels to transparent... this causes jaggies, stepping, or aliasing. To be safe, always set the background to white. EPS files don't normally have this problem, but again, as a standard rule, I always set the background to white for them as well. (As a side note, this also helps with EPS previews sometimes... without a white background, small white or transparent dots will appear in your picture at certain zoom levels.) (As a second side note, remember that Tiffs require an extra amount of processing power and RAM to display using Quicktime. The colours are also not accurate. You may be better off saving the images as EPS files with 8-bit preview... they're not as pretty as Tiffs but they're fast and more colour accurate.)
Second question: Another standard in professional file-building is to always turn off runnarounds unless you need them. I've had so many designers and operators ask me why their text boxes are not showing the text they type into them, only to discover that they've got a runnaround on something that's forcing the type away. This is also why we always set QuarkXpress's default preferences to NOT have runnarounds on anything. MarkZware provides an excellent freeware Xtension called "AllNone XT" that can remove runnarounds from your document.
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