An assessment is made of the tendency of low-profile EUV multilayer mirror defects to print as a function of their height, width, and proximity to features. The study is based on rigorous electromagnetic simulation with TEMPEST and aerial image calculation with SPLAT. A special numerical technique involving the averaging of material properties at multilayer mirror surfaces is used to reduce error introduced by the FDTD gridding. Aerial images are calculated for Gaussian shaped mirror profiles of heights ranging from 1 to 5 nm and for several widths. The dip in clear field intensity for an isolated defect was found to be a strong linear function of defect height from 1 to 5 nm. For a given defect height a worse-case width was observed. As width increased beyond the worst-case width, defects become less printable because they become very flat and begin to approximate perfect mirror surfaces. Aerial images were calculated for mirrors with defects in proximity to mask features. A 1 nm high, 56 nm wide defect caused a significant change in a line's width depending on where the defect was in relation to the line. Tn the worst case, when the defect was centered 22 nm from the line edge a 12% line width change was observed.