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I want to publish a PDF with a print-on-demand service, but the resulting hard copy has errors in the printed colorbars.

The colorbar is generated with TikZ by 

\begin{tikzpicture}
 \begin{axis}[
 scale only axis, width=0pt, height=0pt, hide axis,
 tick label style={/pgf/number format/.cd, fixed},
 colorbar,colormap/jet,
 point meta min=0,
 point meta max=0.05,
  colorbar horizontal,
  colorbar style={
    width=0.8\textwidth,
    xtick={0, 0.01,..., 0.05},
    },
    ]
   { 
  };
 \end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}

and the resulting PDF looks like this colorbar.pdf but the printout is this enter image description here

Asking the publisher I was advised to check transparency. As far as I checked it's not (explicitly) included in the PDF, see f.i. includegraphics: How to check if PDF/PNG are transparent?

Now, I have several options, like using gs and optional force PDF version 1.4 or 1.3, but since I still don't know why it fails, it would be an expensive try and error.

So my question is, why is the color gradient printed wrongly and how can I prevent this within LaTeX?

Community
  • 1
kexx
  • 51
  • The printer is old the PDF is new. Shadings and patterns are always problematic with certain printers. You might want to convert it to a hi-res PNG and include it as an external image for printing purposes as it won't mean anything to have a vector image on a paper. – percusse Dec 17 '15 at 17:55
  • Sounds legit, but I thought for laser printers there is a huge difference between vector and bitmap format of text or, in this case, the ticks and labels? (actually I don't know what machine it is printed with) – kexx Dec 17 '15 at 18:12
  • how does the picture look (on screen) when you add \usepackage[cmyk]{xcolor} to your preamble? Thats how your original version should look printed – Ktree Dec 18 '15 at 12:17
  • 1
    A bit late to the party but I ran into the same problem. A fix is to use a sampled colorbar with a flat shading, and a high number of samples. E.g. add colorbar sampled,colorbar style={samples=80}} to your plot options. – Max Sep 03 '18 at 06:59

0 Answers0