Images With Transparency Get Black Background When Converted to PDF

Support and Advice General Questions
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Hi. I’m working in a personal project that will be printed. I’m working in Microsoft word, and I must send the document as a pdf. I included some images with transparency, but when I convert from word to pdf, they have a black background.

I have tried lots of things, but I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.

This is what I do: In Krita, I only let visible the layer with the drawing, then flat the image (same result if I don’t). That let me with one root layer with my drawing and a background of grey and white squares. (I think that’s transparency). Then I export as a Tiff or png (same result with both), with the alpha channel, flat image, and ICC profile boxes checked.

Then I insert the image in my word document, and export to pdf, in the way the printing company ask: 300ppi pdf/xps compatible with iso 9005-1 compliant (PDF/A). The problem could be word of course, because I’m using an old version (2013), on windows 7 :man_facepalming:. But I’m not sure.

Thanks a lot for any help.
:nerd_face: :+1:

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iso 9005-1 PDF/A1 forbids transparency, so obviously you won’t get transparency. PDF/A2 allows it.

If you need it compliant, then either get rid of transparency or take a screenshot of how the final version looks and crop that screenshot into word.

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You probably are best off to give your transparent images a white background.

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If you wonder why transparency isn’t allowed in PDFs that’s because they are supposed to be like paper documents as much as possible and paper is just not transparent traditionally. One could ask why Word doesn’t make the transparent parts white but this is a Krita forum not MS Word.

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Ah, but I can answer that :-). A fully transparent pixel in Krita in an RGBA document has 0, 0, 0, 0 for channels values. If you lop off the A(lpha) channel, you’re left with 0, 0, 0 – which is black. You can save PNG images without transparency with any color replacing the transparent pixels, though white probably is most useful.

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That’s some lazy ass converting. In all these years I never thought about it that’s from just dropping the alpha channel completely. One would think that Word would be smarter and change the color to something that makes more sense for a print document though.

And I’m a bit embarrassed that this never came to my mind in all my years as a developer who even worked with graphics :sweat_smile:

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Thank you all so much for the answers. Yes, after I went to bed last night I thought in using just white background. But when you don’t understand something, sometimes you just try to stubbornly get it and make it work…

Sorry for bring ms word here, but I was unsure about everything in the process. Now I’m happy to know why things don’t work, even if they still don’t work. Printing can be hell when you are a begginer…

Thank you :woman_mage: :mage:

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Glad we could help you! Now if you’re up for reading a story about huge printing problems, check out this series: The English book printed project: production report 1 - David Revoy

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