Dotted line

[coye]

  
I’m making a dotted grid in Indesign with 2 methods: 1 is made with dotted lines and another one is made with table. As you can see from the photos, the first method printed perfectly (except for those doubling up of dots at the intersection), and the second method has a printing problem and some dots are fading. Colour, stroke weight and stroke style are the same in both methods. Whenever I create solid line grids or dot grids with table, I don’t know why I have the same printing problem. I don’t think it’s related to my printer since the first method printed perfectly. Does anyone know how to fix it?

ps. I print directly in Indesign

[Peter Spier]

How does it appear on screen when you create a PDF? Does it pring correctly from the PDF?I would test the possibility it is the printer by creating perhaps four instances of your table in the four quadrants of the page and rotate two of them 90 degrees by rotating the containng frames.

[coye]

No it's not a PDF. I print directly in Indesign

[Peter Spier]

I understand you are printing direct from InDesign. I want to find out if the problem is in the file, the way InDesign sends the file to print, or in the printer.

InDesign isn't always good at direct printing, so checking agains a PDF is important.

[Jeffrey_Smith]

Table image seems to be rotated at approx. -16° and stroke image seems to be rotated 25°. With slightly different angles of each element, the output grid is not always going to place the same number of micro output pixels in the printing process. A variance in visual result would be expected in comparing the 2 images.

Even if both table and stroke images were created to exact specifications, each process when constructed in postscript is different, and the output may have a slight variance.

[Peter Spier]

I think those images are photos of the printed pages and you can't judge the angles.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

If you're printing in a colour lighter than a solid ink colour, e.g a grey instead of a solid black, you are at the mercy of the actual printing process your printer is using to create colours. A printer usually creates halftone dots (in the case of a laserprinter) or scatter dots (in the case of a typical inkjet). To create very small shapes like the dots in your dotted line, the printer will only have a few halftone dots available to create your object, and they will very likely line up differently on each one of YOUR stroke dots, so your "colour" will seem lighter or darker at various points along the way.. Why it may look better on one than the other depends on EXACTLY how these objects line up with the halftone dots... it can only take a fraction of a distance to affect the results.

When using dotted lines in your design, it's best to use a solid colour. e.g. 100K (solid black) or a mixed colour where one of the primaries (Cyan or Magenta) will be solid, like a Blue.