Color palette issues / questions

[JPL_DESIGN_GUY]

I have been creating colored floor plans for my presentations which always looked fine from my inkjet printer. When I create PDF's however the colored areas seem to show a grid pattern to them based on me using a 25% cover fill rather than 100%. I use the 25% solid fill when I create the slabs because the colors are just too dark otherwise. Can you please tell me a way to remove the lines that appear when I create my PDF's? The lines that appear in the PDF's also show up when I print to our new LaserJet printer.
Another thing I tried was using custom colors which I edited in a color palette so at 100% solid fill the colors weren't so dark. The problem I have here is they look good in the floor plan view but once sent to a layout page for printing the colors seem to change back to the default rather than staying as my custom color.
I have attached a sample PDF showing the issue.
Sorry to run on here, I am just trying to explain the things I have tried.
Your help with this issue would be greatly appreciated!!
Thanks!
John

[Anonymous]

JPL_DESIGN_GUY wrote:
Another thing I tried was using custom colors which I edited in a color palette so at 100% solid fill the colors weren't so dark. The problem I have here is they look good in the floor plan view but once sent to a layout page for printing the colors seem to change back to the default rather than staying as my custom color.

Thanks!
John

If you have separate "working" and "layout" pen sets you need to update both. Not sure if you necessarily work this way but I have a pen set for general drawing / modelling and another assigned to drawing views on layouts which turns certain pens black for printing, with others remaining in colour. Check that you changed the coloured pens in each pen set.
I don't use % fills very often, a hang-up which goes back to the old days when you got different results from a % fill depending on pen thickness.

[Barry Kelly]

John,
I would be guessing that you are PRINTING to PDF rather than PUBLISHING.

Printing uses what ever PDF convertor you have installed and many (most/all?) of these do not play nice with Archicad fills - especially the % fills.

Publishing uses the built in PDF convertor which is designed to work with Archicad and gives much better results.

Barry.

[JPL_DESIGN_GUY]

I would like to try the "Publish" to PDF but I am not sure how to do so. Could you please get me in the right direction to do that? Maybe there is a help topic or training video that covers this if it's not simple enough for you to list??
Thanks so much for your responses!!

[Barry Kelly]

I'm not sure about videos (have a look on the Archicad YouTube channel) but there is a section in the reference guide (HELP menu) called Publisher Function.

Basically setup your layouts - I like to group them in folders.
Open your Organiser so you can see Layouts on the left and Publisher on the right.
Create a Publisher set and set the publishing properties so that you are saving PDF files to the folder path you want.
Select the layout folder and press the Add Shortcut button.
I do this so if you change (add/delete, rename, reorganise) your layouts the Publisher set updates automatically.
You can also just drag layouts (or folders of layouts) to the Publisher set but you will have to manually add more if you create new layouts or move them if you want to re-organise.

So now you have a Publisher Set with the content you want, saving to the folder you want in the format you want.
Now just hit PUBLISH any time you want a new set of documents.
You can also publish just selected items and you can MERGE individual PDFs into one file with many pages.

The names of the items in your publisher list will be the names of the files created so you can edit them (or you layout page names) to get the file names you want.

Barry.

[JPL_DESIGN_GUY]

Thanks for the info Barry!! I am just now getting back to this so I will give it a try and let you know if I have any further questions.