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]

Steven wrote:

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?

I don't think so, but you have Preview which can.

[Anonymous]

Tried it through preview saving it as a tiff then printing from there. Works fine, no problem with fills. A little bit of an annoying workaround but if we need to send out drawings from said printer I guess this is how we do it...

Thank you Michael.

I'll keep everyone updated on what the manufacturer has to say.

[Rick Thompson]

Have you tried plotting? Have you sent a file to a printer to see what they turn out? I have an old Oce 9300 I Plot to, and I have never have that issue, and get great prints. If I print, it is not as good, and so slow... but it's a 7 or 8 year old plotter.

[Anonymous]

Steven wrote:
When we send it to the plotter here in our office it prints fine.

[rgarand]

Work arounds...who said work arounds. When using cad programs that cost thousands of dollars you don't need work arounds. One of these days we will be able to concentrate on the real work we get paid for...design, engineering, construction coordination, planning, etc. 😉

Keep us updated on your progress with this Steven

[Ralph Wessel]

Steven wrote:
Our printer is also quite expensive and it's annoying that it can't print our da mn drawings accurately...

That isn't an unusual problem, sadly. I've previously been assigned the role of selecting the wide-format printer for an office, and came across a couple of very expensive models that couldn't even accurately render HPGL files (.plt). Basic line-work was OK, but fill polygons frequently became a mess, turning inside-out or spraying out across the drawing. Great hardware, rubbish software.

[Anonymous]

Ralph wrote:
Great hardware, rubbish software.

Too true of too many printers/plotters.

I've had good experiences with Canon. Mixed results with all the others.

[rgarand]

We found that 2 years ago when we started looking for our new printer/plotter, that one of the biggest and most important steps was if it has MAC or PC software. So many of the salespeople came in and were 100% sure they could get the printer/plotters to work on the mac...until we gave them one of our laptops and asked them to prove it. We quickly were able to get the selection down to 3 printers. We chose to go the printer/scanner/copier route.

Make sure to have them set the printer up on one of your machines and make sure you can print from ArchiCAD and any other software. We found this invaluable. Just be ready to take 3 to 4 months to chose the damn thing. Seems like a long to to pick a simple piece of hardware, but once you get through all of this, things should run smoothly for a long time.

[Anonymous]

Just got off the phone with one of Canon's tech guys. He remotely accessed my machine and other machines in the office and was baffled as to why this is happening. He finally found one thing that may be causing it. The only print drivers that Canon has available for Mac OSX are PPD drivers, they do not have PS (post script) drivers. Canon has PS drivers available for Windows, but not Mac.

Why provide PS drivers for an inferior operating system and not for far superior Macs?


He thinks this may be the issue, but he's going to get back to me after he talks with his manager. I'll keep you updated.