Transparency + drop shadow = problem

[unknown]

My transparent GIFs with drop shadows look fine on the monitor, but when printing to a PDF (with hi res using Distiller) the images have thin outlines around their frames.

These outlines disappear if I remove the drop shadows.

Have tried moving the images to the front, and played with a couple of flattening settings, but haven't found the solution yet.
Thanks for your help!
Dave

[S***@adobeforums.com]

GIF is inappropriate for print. Open the GIF in Photoshop and convert to RGB or CMYK, whichever is most appropriate. Save as PSD.

[Bob Levine]

And after you do that, you might want to start exporting to PDF using
Acrobat 5 compatibility.

Bob

[R***@adobeforums.com]

The problem is that transparent gifs have a small outline around the edges so they can "mesh/match" with their background (you can choose the matte color when you create gifs, default is white). If you match the color of matte with the background, you won't see anything, but creating a drop shadow will make it apparent.

You could recreate your gif and specify a black matte background as a way around this, but as mentionned earlier, a gif file should never be place in ID as far as I'm concerned.

Later,
Rene

[S***@adobeforums.com]

A GIF always uses indexed RGB colors and is at low resolution so it's always going to look terrible in print!