Thanks David! What I mean by “accurately” and “non-destructive” is I want the pdf to appear as designed without having to use the pathfinder tool on a frame or revert to rudimentary techniques that take longer.
I created a stroked line segment with text in the center. I wanted the frame to fit the text with equal spacing on either side, but the text length varies. My thought was to use a knockout group the size of the text frame. I guess this is tomayto, tomahto as far as technique; rather than have two line segments and a text frame, I have a line segment, knockout frame, and text frame.
The other, more important, knockout I’m using is covering a part of an image frame so content that didn’t fit the layout doesn’t appear. We used a third party designer for the image elements, and his text callouts don’t fit. I don’t want to have to destructively modify the shape of the frame, so I used a knockout in the event that I’ll utilize it in the future.
Neither of these display as designed in browsers, but will print fine.
I tried exporting to Acrobat 4 with Simulate Overprint checked. That does show the knockouts correctly, but it also creates a lot of white hairlines that appear in both Acrobat and browsers—worse in the browser. It’s even showing white hairline outlines of an underlying layer over an image.
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