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?

[Erika Epstein]

Steve, I have no idea, I am not a techie.

I just maxed out the memory. Non-human memory is cheap.

If the machine is that expensive, see if the they will send out the memory for trial solution, free or check if memory is returnable. Try the other suggestions people are posting here as well.

[Anonymous]

rgarand wrote:
One of my colleagues just mentioned to me that he has this problem only when he prints from ArchiCAD. Solution being, print to PDF, open and print from Acrobat. All the fills print fine from Acrobat!

We are all on Macs here, using Acrobat 8 Pro.

Tried it, still doesn't change the output. Still prints two side by side identical fills as different lineweights. I tried File>print>save as pdf then printed and also published the files using the publisher as a pdf then printed, both came out bad.

We only have Adobe Reader though...

[rgarand]

I wouldnt think printing from Reader or Acrobat would make much of a difference...but weirder things have happened. Have you tried remaking the fill.

[Anonymous]

Try saving from ArchiCAD as PDF, then from the PDF save a high res tiff. I think the printer may not handle vector images and is internally converting to raster (and not doing a good job of it).

[Erika Epstein]

Michael wrote:
Try saving from ArchiCAD as PDF, then from the PDF save a high res tiff. I think the printer may not handle vector images and is internally converting to raster (and not doing a good job of it).

Michael, why would the printer do this conversion? Do all printers do this?

[Anonymous]

Its just something that I have personally encountered. Tiff files printed much cleaner that vector PDF espically when there were grayscale fills.

[Anonymous]

Michael wrote:
Its just something that I have personally encountered. Tiff files printed much cleaner that vector PDF espically when there were grayscale fills.

I just tried that and the fills are fine but for whatever reason it comes out extremely grainy, and the file size is huge, 2.3 MB for one sheet while PDF is 238 KB for same sheet.

[Erika Epstein]

Steven, what did the manufacturer say?

[Anonymous]

Michael wrote:
Try saving from ArchiCAD as PDF, then from the PDF save a high res tiff. I think the printer may not handle vector images and is internally converting to raster (and not doing a good job of it).

I don't believe I can do this with just Adobe Reader. Is this correct?

[Anonymous]

Erika wrote:
Steven, what did the manufacturer say?

I'm contacting them now to see if they have any ideas.