Unwanted white borders inside coloured cells (PDF)

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Marie Widell
Posts: 5
Joined: Thu Dec 21, 2017 10:46 am

Unwanted white borders inside coloured cells (PDF)

Unread post by Marie Widell »

Hi!

I have a manual project with tables, and the manual is published as a PDF. The tables have a green header row and thin green borders. The rest is transparent. In H&M the tables look fine, and until recently they looked fine in the PDF output as well. But after I changed the cell padding from 1 to 2 px, I can see a thin white border around the inside edges of the cells in the PDF output. The borders do not disappear when I change the padding back to 1 px or 0 px. They are not visible in H&M.

A colleague had the same problem in another project, but I don't know what change (seemingly) caused that. He "solved" it by not using any colours in his tables, something I would really not prefer to do.
Any idea what causes this? It seems to strike a little bit at random.

We did meddle with the tables a bit by removing some inside borders to get around the problem of the horribly thick cell borders that H&M produces, apparently because it adds a separate border around each cell. But since this did not cause problems the first times we published to PDF, I can't see how this could be the problem. All in all, the table (and image) handling in H&M is very frustrating.

Best regards,
Marie
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Tim Green
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Re: Unwanted white borders inside coloured cells (PDF)

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Marie,

This is an annoying and fundamental problem with tables in PDF. However, in recent versions of Help+Manual it should only occur at some zoom levels in PDF. It happens because of the way PDF is rendered: The backgrounds and borders etc. are all separate objects that need to be scaled separately and at some zoom levels the changes in dimensions for the individual objects result in very small rounding errors.

In addition to the fact that this will often not be visible at most normal display levels, the main thing to do is always make sure you are using the latest version of Help+Manual, since we are constantly improving the PDF engine. The current version is 7.3.3 Build 4342 so you should be at least on that. If you need to update you can download the installer here (just install on top of your current version to update):

https://www.helpandmanual.com/downloads.html?upd

If you like, you can also try out the current beta, which you can get here:

https://www.helpandmanual.com/download/ ... 4_beta.exe

This has a new PDF engine and when I just tried I couldn't reproduce the issue any more. No promises, as I am not yet sure what has changed here and my experience may be related to the monitor I'm using, but it's definitely worth a try.

Merry Christmas! :santa:
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Marie Widell
Posts: 5
Joined: Thu Dec 21, 2017 10:46 am

Re: Unwanted white borders inside coloured cells (PDF)

Unread post by Marie Widell »

Hi Tim,
Thanks for your reply! We are on version 7.2.0, so I will try to upgrade and see if this solves the problem.
All the best for 2018!
/Marie
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