Export Map from Layout View gives white spots in PDF and print

[JamesWingate]

Hello ArcGIS friends,

When creating a PDF via File-->Export Map from the Layout View, I get white spots in several places on the document, both in the PDF and when printing directly via File-->Print. When exporting to PDF or printing directly from the Data View, these spots are not visible. Please see the 3 attached PDF files for reference. ArcView 10.1.

At first I thought the spots were white ellipse shapes that I had accidentally drawn, because I did draw other white ellipse shapes to place over the gaps between a few letters of road label names, but when I try to select these elements, nothing appears to be there. I drew the shapes in the Data View mode anyway, so one would think they would appear in the Layout.

I've tried to get rid of them by manually deleting and recreating the affected labels and all elements in these areas, but the spots seem to appear in other places.

Searching threads in the forum, I found a similar issue back from 2011, but it seemed to never have been resolved:
http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/38302-when-printing-a-layout-into-pdf-file-a-white-polygons-appeare...

I also found another thread that said the problem could be with image compression and to try LZW compression. I tried all of the available options, including lowering the output image quality, but none of those options worked.

Any thoughts? Thanks for helping out a novice user!


James Wingate

[Anonymous User · Accepted solution]

Original User: jwingate

Never mind about this -- I figured it out. I had created some white ellipse shapes in the Layout View and some in the Data View. When I deleted all of the elements from the Data View, it did not delete the ones that were created in the Layout View. Interesting. After deleting them from the Layout View, the export to PDF and print both worked fine, even at max resolution. No more spots.

If you're curious, I had created the ellipse shapes to cover part of the road centerline that was visible underneath the road name labels. The halo I put around the labels was not quite big enough to cover the centerline completely between some letters in the label, like when L & Y are next to each other. Anyway, I ended up removing the halos and simply drawing a polygon on top of the line underneath the label and coloring it white. Then I didn't have any issues with the halo touching the parcel boundaries either.

Thanks to those of you who spent time trying to figure this out. Sorry for the rookie mistake!


James Wingate