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AC18 PDF weirdness

Anonymous
Not applicable
Another AC18 noob question.

I started printing out my first PDFs created in AC18 on my ancient HP Designjet 500, and all the text blocks seem to stack up to where they look like a single Chinese character. All the PDFs created with AC16 still print out fine.

I downloaded the latest HP drivers for my OS, which had no effect.

Is there something peculiar to the AC18 enhanced PDF features that might be creating this issue? Has anyone else experienced this?
5 REPLIES 5
Laszlo Nagy
Community Admin
Community Admin
There were discussions about this in other threads recently. You might have the same issue:

http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=28622&start=10

http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=232625

Basically the situation is that starting from AC 18, the program's PDF Engine does not support PostScript fonts anymore. The official recommendation is to replace these fonts with OpenType or TrueType fonts.
Loving Archicad since 1995 - Find Archicad Tips at x.com/laszlonagy
AMD Ryzen9 5900X CPU, 64 GB RAM 3600 MHz, Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB, 500 GB NVMe SSD
2x28" (2560x1440), Windows 10 PRO ENG, Ac20-Ac27
David Maudlin
Rockstar
Dale:

I recently had this problem printing a PDF file to my HP T120 (creating the PDF file from ArchiCAD was fine). I was able to solve it by clicking the Advanced button in the Adobe Reader Print dialog, then checking the Print as Image option. The fonts I used are TrueType, so the Postscript issue did not seem to apply.

HTH,

David
David Maudlin / Architect
www.davidmaudlin.com
Digital Architecture
AC27 USA • iMac 27" 4.0GHz Quad-core i7 OSX11 | 24 gb ram • MacBook Pro M3 Pro | 36 gb ram OSX14
Anonymous
Not applicable
Interesting.

I'm using Architext, Architext Condensed and Scribble fonts, which all show up in the Font Book as true type fonts. Not PostScript...
Anonymous
Not applicable
The "Print as image" trick seems to work.

Two other interesting things:

First, I substituted a new version of Architext, which Font Book lists as "OpenType TrueType", created a new PDF, and the printing problem remains.

Secondly, I sent yesterday's defective file to the local printer, and they printed out fine.
David Maudlin
Rockstar
Dale wrote:
Secondly, I sent yesterday's defective file to the local printer, and they printed out fine.
This could mean that the issue is with the HP printer driver.

David
David Maudlin / Architect
www.davidmaudlin.com
Digital Architecture
AC27 USA • iMac 27" 4.0GHz Quad-core i7 OSX11 | 24 gb ram • MacBook Pro M3 Pro | 36 gb ram OSX14