ArchiCAD 10 - print quality issues

[Anonymous]

Well, it seems that as we've gotten closer to the printing stage of our jobs we've run across another problem. It seems that we can't get ArchiCAD 10 to match the quality of prints that we achieved in 8.1. We have tried 3 different methods of creating files to send to our plotter that I will outline below, and all 3 present a major roadblock in our printing process.

Option 1 - Publishing to PDF
This solution is lightning quick for us and creates line weights and fills that print/appear in acrobat as expected (compared to 8.1). The problem is that these files currently cause our plotter to freeze instantly upon sending the files. We currently have our Xerox rep looking into it, but I get the impression that they'd rather blame the 3rd party Ayumi (sp?) pdf distiller and call it a day. (for your reference, it's a Xerox 510 plotter & we submit sets with the AccXes Client tools program) These files have worked okay with a print service that we use in California.

Option 2 - Publish to PLT files
This solution is also fast and used to create great output files in ArchiCAD 8.1. But all of the plot files that we create in ArchiCAD 10 have thin line weights and weak stipple fills (gypsum board, sand, etc. most likely due to the weak lineweights) Even though our pens and their weights haven't changed. I have tried using most of the ArchiCAD plotter drivers, but they all have the same effect. (HP, OCE, Xerox, etc.)

Option 3 - Print to PDF using the Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Professional print driver
In ArchiCAD 8.1 this is how we created PDF files for consultants & print services that needed them. This would take a long time to make PDF's of an entire layout book. (about 20 minutes for 15 pages) Now in ArchiCAD 10, this takes about 2 hours to make a PDF of 15 pages. And when it's finally finished, all stipple fills are sparse, it's as if it only shows the dots that fall onto an imaginary secondary grid.

So to recap here are our problems, I'm hoping that someone could shed a little light on them
Publish to PDF - Crashes Our Plotter
Publish to PLT - Light Line weights (almost 1/2 intended thickness)
Print to PDF (Adobe) - Takes ~10 minutes per sheet, output has inconsistent stipple fills

[Djordje]

Did you try to simply PRINT to your Xerox?

[Anonymous]

Djordje wrote:
Did you try to simply PRINT to your Xerox?

I didn't try this, but technically it is not an option because the method we use incorporates tracking for accounting reasons & it also allows us to combine and collating larger sets (ours + consultant's drawings).

I will give it a try anyways to see if it can maybe shed some light on what is causing the other issues.

**** Update ****

I finally got a chance to try it out. Unfortunately the output was the same as using plot files (option 2 above)

Thanks for the idea though

[Anonymous]

belly917 wrote:
... We currently have our Xerox rep looking into it, but I get the impression that they'd rather blame the 3rd party Ayumi (sp?) pdf distiller and call it a day...

We currently have a PDF issue with our Xerox wide format printer, a Xerox 6204.

PDFs print fine from Acrobat Reader, which is good.

But the big frustration is that the Xerox comes with a batch printing program, BT-PlotAssistant 3.4 which is REALLY useful. But, you've guessed it, it does not work with Amyuni PDFs.

To be precise, it will work with Amyuni PDFs that are printed (produced in Acrobat version 1.3) as long as fonts are not embedded, but definitely DOES NOT WORK with PDFs which are published from ArchiCAD 10 as Acrobat version 1.4.

The initial response we received from Graphisoft was that the Xerox software does not work with Acrobat 1.4. However our Allplan PDFs are version 1.5 and have layered information and fonts embedded, and they come out fine.

We have gone back to our ArchiCAD & Xerox dealers to see if either of them can help.

Has anyone else had any problems with the Amyuni PDFs?

[Anonymous]

we have the same problem. Apparently it is a newer postscript language issue and our submission too that xerox sold us is out dated and does not support the pdf versions that Archicad creates. We are looking into other alternatives.

[Anonymous]

Update:

PDF plotting now works for us:

After xerox did a more in-depth analysis of our PDF files (created via ArchiCAD) they found that a bad font in our title block was possibly the problem. So we changed that font, and we have been printing PDF's without a problem since.

Xerox has mentioned that they will be updating the plotter controller software to gracefully reject PDF's that contain errors instead of having the device crash. As of today, I haven't seen this patch.


Ciao,
Phil