MANUAL FLATTENING

MANUAL FLATTENING SIMPLIFIED

Further clarifying what Mr. Jeff Harrison wants to say in his blog

Manual Flattening is the best solution to avoid any possible headaches in publishing to PDF or to RIP. Let's see how to manually flatten parts of a design.

NOTE: Before flattening, back-up your original unflattened .cdr file for future editing.

WHAT OBJECTS TO FLATTEN:

• Drop Shadows
• Live Transparencies and any type of shape
• Lens effects (as found in Lens docker by pressing Alt+F3)
• Bevel effects
• Bitmaps with alpha channels
• Power Clipped Items (If you have just the pure vectors, you don't need to flatten them)
• And anything in between the above mentioned objects

SIMPLE TECHNIQUE FOR FLATTENING

• Open Object Manager, create a new Layer and name it "VECTORS"
• Hide this new layer if you like to better assess what's going on.
• Go to your original design layer(s).
• Move numerous shift-selected Pure Vector items up to the Vector Layer, by pressing Ctrl+Home.
• Click Yes on the warning that you receive and also tick "don't show warning again" if you like.
• Once you've moved all of your pure vector items to the Vectors layer, you now have all the contents on the design layer ready to be converted to one single bitmap.
• Don't forget to "show" the Vector layer that you'd hidden earlier

in any case, ensure that the stacking order of all elements is correct, meaning that after moving elements everything is visually layered the same way as it was in original design.

To convert certain elements to a single bitmap, select them, and go to Bitmaps > Convert to Bitmaps.

When converting these kinds of items to a bitmap, "resolution" is very important. If you are dealing with small items, like for example a business card, you need to convert it to bitmap at much higher resolution than you do a large dimension sign or poster. Some guidelines from Jeff:

For typical output on a CMYK device such as a printing press or digital color device such as a Xerox or Canon, choose the CMYK color model and have Apply ICC profile checked.

Have Anti-aliasing checked.

Don't check Transparent background.

NOTE: If you have more Vectors than Flattening Contents you can do the above mentioned process in reverse order; for example instead of creating layer above, you can create new layer and send it deep beneath the stacking order and start moving your Contents to Flatten down by pressing Ctrl+End

Example:

Complete Design:

 Pure Vectors:

 Flattened Contents (a single bitmap):