topic Re: 2x2 ceiling fill printing problem in Documentation

2x2 ceiling fill printing problem

dhnguyen — Fri, 19 May 2023 20:07:49 GMT

I'm not sure why when I print out my reflected ceiling plan, my 2x2 ceiling fill comes out funny--- has anyone has this problem and how did you solve it?
Even if i changed my pen weight from .05mm to .15mm, it does not make a difference.

attached are 2 different images, 1 is a pdf and the other one is a hard copy.

Re: 2x2 ceiling fill printing problem

Christophe Fortineau — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 15:18:36 GMT

Hello,

Did you print it by a Publication/Draw, by Files/Print, by Files/Draw or by printing a PDF with an external viewer ?

Re: 2x2 ceiling fill printing problem

dhnguyen — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 15:32:04 GMT

Hi,

I used the navigator to publish the pdf, then i print it to the plotter (HPDESIGN JET)

Re: 2x2 ceiling fill printing problem

Christophe Fortineau — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 09:56:01 GMT

Hello,

I am not surprised then. The subject seems to me more to be the printer driver of your plotter HP rather than Archicad. Also it would seem to me more relevant to use the Archicad plot function than the print function.
What is you paper size we can see on your picture ?

Have a nice day ,

Re: 2x2 ceiling fill printing problem

dhnguyen — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 13:35:16 GMT

it's 30" x 42" - see attached

Re: 2x2 ceiling fill printing problem

Christophe Fortineau — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 11:27:44 GMT

Print is more for A4, A3 and other little paper size
All taller paper size have to be plot and not print to have better result
Try and tell us ◔_◔

Re: 2x2 ceiling fill printing problem

Erwin Edel — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 07:28:28 GMT

Sorry, but I have to disagree. Most large format printers are excactly that: a printer. The plot function is not well suited for these machines.

We've been printing to our large format machines since about AC10 when plotmaker was obsolete and we got a new Océ TCS500 at the time.

Currently we have Canon machine and we use print for that too.

Printing directly from Archicad yields better and faster results than publishing to PDF and printing that, by the way. At least in my experience with several large format printers.

Just set up a printing publishing set.

Re: 2x2 ceiling fill printing problem

Christophe Fortineau — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 07:54:18 GMT

Erwin wrote:
Printing directly from Archicad yields better and faster results than publishing to PDF and printing that, by the way.

Of course !

All is written here :
https://helpcenter.graphisoft.com/knowledgebase/25620/

Re: 2x2 ceiling fill printing problem

dhnguyen — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 15:30:16 GMT

Thank you for your responses, printing the drawing directly to the plotter solves this problem, however, if I send the drawing to consultants as a PDF, this option takes forever to print to PDF. It has been 20 minutes and I still haven't been able to print to PDF-- not sure why. I changed my dpi to 300 to speed up the process but it doesn't seem to work.

Re: 2x2 ceiling fill printing problem

Christophe Fortineau — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 17:08:57 GMT

Today and since few years there is no real solution to print a heavy pdf which have got a lot of hatch : for a lot of software and I don't know why.

You can also transform your vectorial pdf into a bitmap pdf to be sure it could be print easier than you original pdf but... It's not a vectoriel file ! 😕

I dream about a new archicad function to do that !

Re: 2x2 ceiling fill printing problem

mikas — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 19:18:09 GMT

To the OP.
I believe it must be a shear scaling problem with your hatches. Your printer is not near enough capable to reproduce the finesse you put into your drawings. I downloaded your file, and opened it with MacOS preview. I scaled it 800%. There still seems to be a really thin hair line viewed even with my Precision monitor 4K Dell (please see screenshot).

Your plotter does not know how to plot almost non existent lines, it has to do a software based rasterization within the limits of the hard wired dots per inch of the plotter mechanics (300dpi/600dpi/1200dpi etc).

When it's (the plotter) being hit with a precision too much for it, it comes to a limit and has to make a decision; To plot, or not to plot - that is the question.

Obviously it chose wrong.

Re: 2x2 ceiling fill printing problem

dhnguyen — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 14:16:05 GMT

I use a color plotter to print all of my drawings. It's an HPDesign Jet. I think I figured out what was the problem.---

I created my 2x2 ceiling as 1 massive big fill and ArchiCAD wasn't able to handle it. So I recreated them into multiple smaller fills at each area and that seems to do the trick. Thank you everyone for your help. If anyone has this problem in the future, I hope my response also helps you.

Re: 2x2 ceiling fill printing problem

Barry Kelly — Wed, 02 Oct 2019 01:13:56 GMT

dhnguyen wrote:
I use a color plotter to print all of my drawings. It's an HPDesign Jet.

But remember, it is a printer not a plotter.

Barry.