You use the preview options in the Flattener Preview palette to highlight the areas affected by flattening artwork. You can use this information to adjust the flattening options, and even use the palette to save flattener presets.For more information, see Using palettes.
Flattener Preview palette A. Palette menu B. Refresh button C. Highlight menu D. Overprint menu E. Transparency flattening settings F. Preview area
Note: The Flattener Preview palette is not intended for precise previewing of spot colors, overprints, and blending modes. Use Overprint Preview mode in Illustrator to preview spot colors, overprints, and blending modes as they will appear when output.
Displaying the Flattener Preview palette
Choose Window > Flattener Preview.
Using the palette menu
Click the triangle
in the upper right corner of the palette.
Showing and hiding options
Choose Show Options or Hide Options from the palette menu.
Choosing a preview mode
Choose a preview mode from the palette menu:
- Quick Preview to compute the quickest preview. This gives you access to all of the options in the Highlight pop-up menu except All Rasterized Regions.
- Detailed Preview to add the option All Rasterized Regions to the Highlight pop-up menu. This option is more performance-intensive to compute.
Choosing overprint options to preview
Choose what type of overprinting to use for the preview:
- Preserve to retain overprinting for devices that support it. In most cases, only separations devices support overprinting.
- Simulate to maintain the appearance of overprinting in composite output.
- Discard to ignore any overprint settings that are present in your document. This option can be chosen for both composites and separations.
Choosing a transparency flattening preset for the preview
Choose a preset from the Preset pop-up menu. (See Controlling flattening using transparency flattener presets.)
Adjusting transparency flattening settings
See Transparency flattener options.
Refreshing the preview
Click Refresh to update the display in the preview area of the palette according to the transparency flattening settings you chose. The areas of the artwork where selected highlight option applies are highlighted in color, while the rest of the artwork appears in grayscale.
Choosing areas to highlight
Choose what to highlight from the Highlight pop-up menu:
- None (Color Preview) shows a color preview of the artwork without highlighting anything. This option is automatically chosen whenever any other choice in the Highlight menu is invalid because you've changed the artwork or transparency flattening settings.
- Rasterized Complex Regions to highlight the areas that will be rasterized for performance reasons (as determined by the Rasters/Vectors slider). Keep in mind that the boundary of the highlight area has a higher probability of producing stitching problems (depending on the print-driver settings and the rasterization resolution). Select the Clip Complex Regions option to minimize stitching problems. (See Transparency flattener options.)
Preview with Rasterized Complex Regions highlighted and Clip Complex Regions unselected (left) and selected (right)
- Transparent Objects to highlight the objects that are sources of transparency, such as objects with partial opacity (including images with alpha channels), objects with blending modes, and objects with opacity masks. In addition, graphic styles and effects may contain transparency, and overprinted objects may be treated as sources of transparency if the overprint needs to be flattened.
- All Affected Objects to highlight all objects that are involved in transparency, including transparent objects and objects that are overlapped by transparent objects. The highlighted objects will be affected by the flattening process--their strokes or patterns will be expanded, portions of them may get rasterized, and so on.
- Affected Linked EPS Files to highlight all linked EPS files that are affected by transparency.
- Expanded Patterns to highlight all patterns that will be expanded because they are involved in transparency.
- Outlined Strokes to highlight all strokes that will be outlined because they are involved in transparency or because the Convert All Strokes to Outlines option is selected. (See Transparency flattener options.)
- Outlined Text to highlight all text that will be outlined because it is involved in transparency or because the Convert All Text to Outlines option is selected. (See Transparency flattener options.)
Note: In the final output, outlined strokes and text may appear slightly different from native ones, especially very thin strokes and very small text. However, the Flattener Preview palette does not highlight this altered appearance.
- All Rasterized Regions to highlight objects and intersections of objects that will be rasterized because there is no other way of representing them in PostScript or because they are more complex than the threshold specified by the Rasters/Vectors slider. For example, the intersection of two transparent gradients will always be rasterized, even when the Rasters/Vectors value is 100. Note that this option takes longer to process than the others.
Note: The preview only highlights images that are resampled during flattening (not objects such as opaque images that do not interact with transparent objects).
Magnifying the preview
To magnify the preview, click in the preview area. To zoom out, Alt-click (Windows) or Option-click in the preview area. To pan the preview, hold down the spacebar and drag in the preview area.
Note: The preview does not show how rasterized areas will appear at the specified rasterization resolution, regardless of magnification.