We have a subtle gradient on headline text in a Pages document – looks great. On export to PDF, things go south, and I'm pretty sure this didn't use to happen.
Here's the text in Pages:
Here it is in Preview, zoomed in:
Looks like an inside shadow or something, but you can't even do that in Pages. Also note the circle made of dots turn into squares in the PDF.
MacBook Pro (M1, 2020)
Can't believe this is still not fixed. With Apple's history in design and making graphics, type and generally anything look better than anyone else, it blows me away that such a glaring issue still exists. This happens in Pages but not in Keynote interestingly. From what I can tell, when rendering (exporting) a PDF, Pages treats these gradient filled text elements as part of the PDF "background". I can see this because at least with my printer when I toggle the print page background on and off, those gradients turn to black text.
Regardless, adding my Me Too to this.
When you use transparency (and gradient uses it) in a Pages document and export that raster text to PDF, that gradient is rendered at 72 dpi on its exported trip to the PDF. It will not appear as nice as it does in the Pages document due to that transformative degradation.
However, If you were to use Affinity Designer 2 and create the same gradient text and then convert that text to vector outlines, that text would export to PDF (or SVG) without rasterization or loss of clarity, and then you drop that result into Pages. When you export that Pages content to PDF, that text will be unflawed.
Why do gradients use transparency when it isn't specified? Was obviously being rendered out… Seems like an odd choice when a clipping path could just be applied to the gradient.
It really just makes it unusable, so we'll probably rebuild in Indesign or Affinity Publisher. Painful. Doing it as graphics doesn't make sense, as we have to keep them accessible.
Although it is not specified in Pages, gradients do incorporate transparency in the process of forming the gradient. As do borders, drop shadows, and reflections. All text in Pages is raster, whereas one can convert text to vector in Affinity Designer.
Publisher would allow one to jump out to Designer to generate vector text effects, though uncertain if one can directly do that in Publisher without Designer assistance.
Yes, I understand what they're doing. But they shouldn't. It looks terrible. They could at least offer to rasterize it at a higher quality.
We're a design and dev shop, so we don't usually do this in Pages. The client asked us to so they could edit it later. We'll redo it in something else. I'll file a radar.
Not fixed in the Dec 13, 2024 update to 14.3 (7042.0.76) either.
PDF output from Pages slightly broken with gradient text.
