Fill Printing conundrum

[Anonymous]

Hello,

We've had this problem for quite a few versions of archicad and have never addressed it. See attached image (sorry so grainy). Some fills print out dark, some light, even though they are exactly the same fill. The areas that look white on the attachment are actually the same fill that's adjacent to them. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why this is happening. Also, we have a standard 4" horizontal fill we use for clapboards, and as you can see in the right part of the attachment, a few horizontal lines will show dark and a few will show light. This seems to happen in a pattern.

Any ideas?

[Anonymous]

Even if I publish as a PDF and print it from there using adobe reader, still prints messed up...

[Erich]

Steven,

I don't get this when printing an elevation with only vectorial hatching on as you appear to be showing but if I print the same elevation with shadows turned on I get a similar effect where some areas print correctly while others are lighter (typically in a rectangular patches). Do you have shadows on but turned very light?

For me, the elevations (or pdf's if I print to a file) look fine on screen. Only the printed output looks wrong. It also appears to be printer independent as I have this same effect with any printer I have tried to date.

I would love to know if anyone has a solution.

[Anonymous]

Shadows are not on. The elevation is also a line drawing with fills, no 3D at all.

[Erwin Edel]

What kind of pen weight are we talking about?

Personally I never go below 0,09 mm for my pens and they print just fine.

Could you perhaps save the fill as .aat file through the attribute manager and attach it?

[Anonymous]

The fills are the lightest possible (0 mm), they normally come out fine, but some of the time they print out different shades. This happens to me with a lot of the standard archicad fills, no need to attach a fill file you already have.

[Erwin Edel]

I use a different release of ArchiCAD, not sure if it's got the same fills. I did have problems with 0 mm lines and just put them at 0.09 mm (the pens I use for linework). Maybe even something like 0.01 mm would fix it.

[Anonymous]

Put the pen weight up a bit, nothing changed.

BTW, when you place a drawing on a layout, do you have it as color? When we place a drawing on a sheet, we change the pen set to a plotting pen set, which is all black but keeps the same lineweights. Is this necessary?

[Anonymous]

Could it be a printer specific issue?

[Erwin Edel]

Yeah, I have working and plotting pen sets. The first being coloured, the latter has black pens (the ones we want to be black, of course). I also have a greyed pen set I sometimes use.

If you want to have coloured pens in your work views, you need multiple pen sets with corresponding pen weights.

I define my pen sets for the drawing I placed (black set) and have the colours put on 'Defined by Pen Set'.


Possible workaround could be to rasterize your PDF at 150 or more dpi. (maybe even 600? Higher than that would be pointless for most printing devices) I think you need Acrobat Pro to do that, couldn't find it in my normal version.

If you suspect the printer (I would), I'd consult the manufacturer's helpdesk and have 'em send someone over.