Mysterious Lines

Question

So any help would be useful.
At our shop we use CS3. Usually when creating our artwork for print we use this work flow:
1. Flatten transparency
2. Save as .EPS
3. Distillation (PDF/X-1a;2001)
This creates small, strange, artifact looking lines throughout the document. These do not print and if you zoom in on them in acrobat they disappear which would lead one to assume that they do no exist. Recently we had a printer claiming that they printed out and I need to find a way to circumvent these 'mysterious lines'. They also cause a lot of problems with clients.
So any help, info, input would be helpful because i cannot find any record of this particular thing occurring.
IM: [email protected]

Answer 1

Brian:
You can export PDFs with transparency (export as PDF1.5 or higher) for your clients though this can also cause problems with printing on their end (ie the office laser). But worth a shot.
You can avoid transparency too, which is not all that hard depending on your design requirements. I haven't found a simple solution, in other words something I know I can send to anyone and completely avoid problems. The only surefire way to do this is to kill off transparency in your docs. Go old school.
Maybe someone can shed some light on this.
It's all fine and good to say get a new printer etc etc. But when sending ads to a newspaper that's the only one in town, other solutions are needed. It is clear that your printer should know exactly what those "mysterious lines" are (they're called "stitching" usually) and the fact that they don't should be a HUGE red flag for you in this process.
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/pdfs/txpguidecs2.pdf
J