Printing Grayscale ArchiCAD 11 vs ArchiCAD 10

[Anonymous]

Our office recently upgraded from ArchiCAD 10 to 11. In version 10 I was getting used to using a light grey solid fill and having it print as a grayscale. Now opening those same drawings in 11, they are printing solid black regardless of what colour the solid fill is.

Is this just a simple setting or a change for 11.

I can post / send an example to anyone who can help me.

Thanks,

Dan

[Anonymous]

Should I just call Graphisoft?

[Richard Morrison]

It may be a setting in your printer rather than in Archicad. You will probably get a better response if you tell people what printer, etc. you're using.

[Anonymous]

It doesnt matter which printer we use it still does it, but if it helps the problems occurs when creating Adobe PDFs, or with our Epson Stylus Pro 4000, Xerox WC 7132, and the HP Design Jet 750.

And I still have both 10 and 11 on my computer, I only use 10 to print, and I am using the same printer drivers with the same settings.

[Richard Morrison]

Well, you might start by checking "Model View Options" in AC11. If the the fill background setting is set to "solid" rather than "by Element Settings", you could get a different result, even though they might look the same on the screen.

[Rick Thompson]

There was a change from AC10 to AC11 that might require you to manually change some of your fills. Notice the percent fills. They use to display and print as grids and dots (if I remember correctly), and now they was actually gray scale fills. So yes ,there was a change, and I can't remember the details. It was discussed here.. somewhere. Your dealer should know.

[Anonymous]

I compared all my settings from 10 to 11 to make sure they are the same. But it still didnt work.

Thats really annoying, but you are right they have reverted back to the percentage fills like in 9. I much prefer using solid fills, I guess I have to change all my solid fills to percentage ones

[Thomas Holm]

Platform?

[Anonymous]

I am using XP Pro 64bit, but I also tried it on other computers in the office that run XP and we get the same results.

[Thomas Holm]

You might have set your print to B/W in the Archicad pane of the Print dialog. I dunno if this is new default in AC11, but it's happened to me that I've got the wrong setting. If you set AC to print B/W all solid fills will print black. To get greyscale with that setting you need to use the percentage fills. They do not behave as solid, even iff they are not bitmapped as they were in earlier releases,.

If you, like me often use grey pens to get greyscale, you must turn off B/W in the Archicad pane of the Print dialog. This will print grey pens grey, but also colors will print in color. There is no greyscale print setting within Archicad.

If you want to turn all solid colors to grey when printing, you need to use a system or printer setting rather than Archicad's. On the mac you can use the ColorSync pane, and use the Quartz filter Gray Tone. Also, your printer might have options.

Below, examples:
First a screen dump. Then a scanned image of the printed result, first with Archicad's output with B/W off, then with it on.