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This PDF is composed of several source pieces. Five of them are PNGs containing an alpha channel. One is a PNG with no alpha channel. And the last piece is a Photoshop PDF with transparency effects. The pieces were assembled using ABCpdf 9.1.

On Acrobat 9, Foxit Reader, and Chrome's in-browser PDF viewer, these display correctly, with the Photoshop background showing through the transparent part of the alpha channel PNGs, and the non-alpha PNG showing through the center of the Photoshop image.

correct display

On Acrobat X or Acrobat XI, anything that is meant to be a transparent area is instead solid white. If Edit/Preferences/Page Display/Show transparency grid is checked, then the solid white becomes the gray checkerboard. But the background never shows through.

incorrect display

(Yes, these screenshots are of different PDFs, and both are different from the PDF linked above. But the transparency problem affects all of them.)

Does anyone know why it would be doing this? Did we construct it wrong?

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Ross Presser
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1 Answers1

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The one page in your document has a Group entry defining the attributes of the page (transparency) group:

/Group <<
/I true
/K true
/S /Transparency
/Type /Group
>>

The K entry is specified as

K boolean (Optional) A flag specifying whether the transparency group is a knockout group (see “Knockout Groups”). If this flag is false, later objects within the group shall be composited with earlier ones with which they overlap; if true, they shall be composited with the group’s initial backdrop and shall overwrite (“knock out”) any earlier overlapping objects. Default value: false.

As the value is true, any earlier overlapping objects (including the objects you want to be visible by transparency) are knocked out and you only see the white page background.

Using /K false instead renders the image as desired:

Your original document (/K true) in Adobe Reader XI:

Knockout true

Your document with the knockout entry disabled (/K false) in Adobe Reader XI:

enter image description here

For details cf. the PDF specification ISO 32000-1

  • table 30 Entries in a page object for the page dictionary Group entry;
  • section 11.4.7 Page Group for a definition of the page group;
  • section 11.6.6 Transparency Group XObjects for the entries of the page group dictionary.
mkl
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  • So evidently Acrobat X and XI are displaying it correctly, and all other PDF consumers are not. Do you have any idea how this knockout value could have been set through using Photoshop as a PDF creator? Because we **don't** want the knockout. – Ross Presser Mar 05 '14 at 20:19
  • *So evidently Acrobat X and XI are displaying it correctly, and all other PDF consumers are not* - this is not too surprising; after all, for a long time the Acrobat software has defined how a PDF is to be displayed (the old PDF references were not considered normative in nature). Now they have to follow the ISO standard (which is normative) but still are the most complete implementors and try to remain top. – mkl Mar 05 '14 at 21:39
  • *Do you have any idea how this knockout value could have been set through using Photoshop as a PDF creator?* - No. Which Photoshop version is used? Maybe that version still is more in sync with the PDF understanding represented by Acrobat 9.x. – mkl Mar 05 '14 at 21:41