topic Problems with fills - printed results in Documentation

Problems with fills - printed results

Anonymous — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 13:38:11 GMT

Okay, a little background.

We have been slowly migrating from ArchiCAD 8.1 to 10, and now we've finally started putting the first of out version 10 projects on paper. Now I know that we've jumped 2 versions, and I'm aware that 9 was a big leap from 8, but I just was wondering if anyone can offer any suggestions to my problem.

Here's the problem.. a good dozen or so of our fills that appeared correctly when printed/plotted in AC8.1 appear 10x as dense in AC10. Gypsum Board, 75%, 50%, 25%, etc. all appear to be solid when plotted at full size (B&W). even if I start a completely new file, and just draw a few things and then print it, those default 10 fills plot as solid black, even with a moderate pen weight applied to the fill.

I'm assuming that going into the fill types and modifying the spacing [point size] would fix this problem.. but doing that for every existing file would be a headache (even if I propagated this with an aat file). Am I missing something.. how does everyone else cope with this?

Re: Problems with fills - printed results

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 23:05:49 GMT

Well after having a talk with our reseller, he pointed me to this archi-wiki entry about this specific problem

http://www.archicadwiki.com/Percentage_Fill?highlight=%28fill%29

About 6-10 of our fills have the same bitmap pattern as the percentage fills, therefore their vectoral pattern is ignored. And many of our composite walls used the 25% fill (which now plots black and is essentially useless)

So, after modifying all our composite wall types in most of our current projects, I've also began changing the bitmap patterns that conflict with the percentage fills. But propogating these changes to all active files is going to be a nightmare! I know I can use an aat file, but most of our files, have different index numbers for similar fills in different file making replacing the currently used fills logistically complicated.

What was graphisoft thinking when they implemented this change? This totally reeks havoc on fills and backward compatilibility. Even if you use the default 10 template, there's 5 or so fills that have conflicting bitmap patterns (i.e. Gypsum board) straight out of the box.

Anyways, if anyone can shed some light on a quicker solution to keep all of our current fills from appearing black without going systematically through every single project file, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,
Phil

Re: Problems with fills - printed results - AC10 useless

Anonymous — Sat, 12 May 2007 17:33:58 GMT

Well after having a talk with our reseller, he pointed me to this archi-wiki entry about this specific problem

http://www.archicadwiki.com/Percentage_Fill?highlight=%28fill%29

About 6-10 of our fills have the same bitmap pattern as the percentage fills, therefore their vectoral pattern is ignored. And many of our composite walls used the 25% fill (which now plots black and is essentially useless)

So, after modifying all our composite wall types in most of our current projects, I've also began changing the bitmap patterns that conflict with the percentage fills. But propogating these changes to all active files is going to be a nightmare! I know I can use an aat file, but most of our files, have different index numbers for similar fills in different file making replacing the currently used fills logistically complicated.

What was graphisoft thinking when they implemented this change? This totally reeks havoc on fills and backward compatilibility. Even if you use the default 10 template, there's 5 or so fills that have conflicting bitmap patterns (i.e. Gypsum board) straight out of the box.

Anyways, if anyone can shed some light on a quicker solution to keep all of our current fills from appearing black without going systematically through every single project file, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,
Phil
_________________
ArchiCAD 10 - 1010 USA Full
(9x) Win XP Pro
(7x) Mac OS 10.4

For me this makes AC10 useless until corrected, or is there a correction, does 11 addresses this

Re: Problems with fills - printed results

Anonymous — Thu, 17 May 2007 03:57:06 GMT

Phil,
Are you printing using the Vectorial pattern or the Bitmap pattern? Each fill has a bitmap pattern AND a vectorial pattern. In the On-Screen View Options you can toggle between them. Make sure that it is set to the one you intend to use.
I hope that helps.

Re: Problems with fills - printed results

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 12:41:24 GMT

We are having a few issues with percentage fills in ArchiCAD 11, printing to a Xerox wide format printer.

Identical fills come out different shades, almost at random, which is annoying.

We have found that to get reliable results with all the fills looking the same we need to export a PDF and print from that.

This also solves other printing problems such as missing drawing content when printing a drawing layout with a large bitmap PDF image included.

Re: Problems with fills - printed results

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 16:32:26 GMT

To use these fill type you must choose the highest resolution dpi for your pdf.

Re: Problems with fills - printed results

Anonymous — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 23:15:07 GMT

I don't know if this is the same problem that Andy Harle was having, but we are also having a major problem with printing some of our fills.

We're getting pieces of fills (and even lines) that print as though they are heavily screened in a seemingly random fashion. This occurs with many different types of fill, including custom symbol fills, where even different parts of the same fill get printed at different shades. This is not a printer issue, because the same parts of the fills consistently drop out of the printed images, and this occurs on output sheets from several different printers AND plotters. Even some of the lines that should be solid black are printing as light screened lines. See areas circled in the attached pdf.

Re: Problems with fills - printed results

jameshart — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:52:24 GMT

mstoner47 wrote:
I don't know if this is the same problem that Andy Harle was having, but we are also having a major problem with printing some of our fills.

We're getting pieces of fills (and even lines) that print as though they are heavily screened in a seemingly random fashion. This occurs with many different types of fill, including custom symbol fills, where even different parts of the same fill get printed at different shades. This is not a printer issue, because the same parts of the fills consistently drop out of the printed images, and this occurs on output sheets from several different printers AND plotters. Even some of the lines that should be solid black are printing as light screened lines. See areas circled in the attached pdf.

We had this problem in our office this morning and we noticed that it only happened when we used File>Print and printed using the Adobe PDF creator. If we do File>Save As... and choose file type PDF instead, we seem to avoid this problem.

Re: Problems with fills - printed results

Anonymous — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:09:56 GMT

Yes, we are having the same problem as you, boarderj02: If I print a PDF using the PDF creator from the File>Print dialog box, I have the same fill problems as if I were to use publisher to print or plot drawings on paper. If I create acrobat PDFs with publisher or with File>Save As... the PDF output is accurate, and I can then print the PDFs from Adobe Acrobat with no trouble.

This is still a major problem; however, because it is a huge waste of time to publish everything to PDF and then open each drawing in Adobe Acrobat and print each one separately. It is SO FRUSTRATING to not be able to use publisher to print out an entire set of drawings in one move. As it stands, I cannot use publisher, because it makes it look like our printer is working incorrectly and our drawings look very unprofessional. When I print the same drawings from PDF on the same printer, everything looks fine.

Graphisoft, please help us!

Thanks

Re: Problems with fills - printed results

jameshart — Tue, 27 May 2008 18:48:04 GMT

mstoner47 wrote:
Yes, we are having the same problem as you, boarderj02: If I print a PDF using the PDF creator from the File>Print dialog box, I have the same fill problems as if I were to use publisher to print or plot drawings on paper. If I create acrobat PDFs with publisher or with File>Save As... the PDF output is accurate, and I can then print the PDFs from Adobe Acrobat with no trouble.

This is still a major problem; however, because it is a huge waste of time to publish everything to PDF and then open each drawing in Adobe Acrobat and print each one separately. It is SO FRUSTRATING to not be able to use publisher to print out an entire set of drawings in one move. As it stands, I cannot use publisher, because it makes it look like our printer is working incorrectly and our drawings look very unprofessional. When I print the same drawings from PDF on the same printer, everything looks fine.

Graphisoft, please help us!

Thanks

Try doing this: Navigate to a layout you want to include in your PDF. (You must be looking at a sheet for this to work correctly.) Next select all the sheets you want to include in your PDF in the navigator. Then go File>Save as... and change the type to PDF. Before hitting save, click the "Document Options" button (this button only appears after changing the document type to PDF) and change the option that says to print "This Layout" to "Selected Layouts in Navigator."

Hope this helps!

Re: Problems with fills - printed results

Anonymous — Tue, 27 May 2008 23:45:53 GMT

Thanks, but I can already make error-free PDFs directly from publisher. The problem is that I can't print with error free fills.

Re: Problems with fills - printed results

schagemann — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:01:43 GMT

hello,

2 years later same problem - we are attempting to print from AC13 & 14 (AUS latest hotfixes applied) to a variety of xerox printers (510, 5440 & 4440) and get very inconsistent /random print reproduction of lineweights, fills and sometimes even linetypes.

similar as described in the following posts we have experienced this for quite some time in varying degrees:
http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=165230

at the moment the only workaround for us seems to be to use adobe reader changing the settings to print as image for printing, which produces more acceptable print quality.

we also had the xerox technicians in and they pointed their fingers at graphisoft.

does anybody know how to solve this problem?

ds.