Problem with image fills when printing

[Anonymous]

I try to avoid image fills as much as I can because they cause me nothing but trouble when printing, but this time I can not avoid them and I need some advice on what is the best way to manage them.

We have a project with relatively long facade and for the presentation elevations we have used an image fill for the brick. Not ideal, but that is how it is for now... or until proven unusable. One such exported PDF is not extremely large, about 4 MB for an A3 page, but the facade itself is fragmented - consists of small "textures" that slowly reload every time I open the PDF.

But the biggest problem is when someone tries to print the PDF. From a 4 MB the file grows to more than 1 GB in the printer queue and blocks our company printer server... Even the Adobe Acrobat has problems when optimizing the file.

So, does anyone have any good practice when working with image fills?

[Anonymous]

The small repeated texture is the texture pattern used to create the image fill.
To reduce the tiling create a larger texture (more bricks) in a photo editing package and use this for your image fill. To reduce the memory requirements for printing you need to look at both the image resolution and bit depth, image resolution should not really be any more than 150 dpi at output size and 24 bit colour with no alpha channels etc

Regards
Scott

[Anonymous]

Thanks Scott,

Both dpi and resolution were quite low, but the image size was causing most of the problems. The image/texture was about 2 meters by 2 meters section of a brick facade and its size was more than 2000 pixels. So after drastically reducing it to about 15%, the elevation was at least printable.

But I still don't really understand how or why would the size of the print job with the original texture grow from a 4 MB file to more than 1 GB in the printer queue. Especially when the new file size with reduced texture is about the same as the old one.

And as for the slow rebuild of the texture when opening PDF - why doesn't Archicad "flatten" the texture before/while publishing it to PDF?

[Anonymous]

Let’s say you have a 600dpi printer a one square inch image will be 360,000 pixels, each pixel will contain 24 bits of information so we have at a minimum 8,640,000bits or 1,080,000 bytes of information without the printer instructions.

So a B1 page (nom 27x40 inches) would be 27x40x1080000 = 1,166,400,000 bytes or 1.166 Gb

Depending on your printer type the multiplier for the printer instructions will vary, postscript printers will typically be smaller than GDI / EMF printers as they can handle the vector data and images directly whereas other printers need the computer to do the processing.