Protruding Dots at Drawing Boundaries

[Gerry Leonor]

this was already probably a bit of an annoyance earlier to me, but someone brought it to my attention.

on the left, you've got a screenshot of a drawing on a layout with a break-line object with a masking fill covering the rest of the slab section details.

on the right, you've got a screenshot of the same drawing in PDF, & you'll see a most of the masking fill covering the slab section detail except when it gets to the boundary of the drawing -- where you'll see a bit of the covered model poking through the drawing boundary. it's thickness depends on the thickness of the pen used for the line / cut-line. the only fix we found for this was to add ANOTHER masking fill in the layout just to cover this protrusion. i even tried adding a white line boundary around the drawing & the black dots still pop-up. no matter if i put the masking object/fill to the top of the Display Order, the dots still appear.

is there a fix for this?

[Minh Nguyen]

Dear All,

Thank you very much for sharing your experience with this issue!

Based on the screenshot, it looks like upon exporting to PDF, the masking effect somehow failed to cover the end of the line, thus rendering a tiny cut piece of it. Unfortunately, I couldn't find this object in the default Archicad library, so I assume this is a custom object?

Best regards,

Minh

[Barry Kelly]

It is actually an object in BIMComponents.

Looking at the script, I wonder if it is the way the masking fill is scripted.

It has a contour, but the nodes have a mask that turn some of the contour lines off.

I think that might be it.

But I am not sure why when the drawing frame crops of the missing line of the mask, the ends of lines underneath still bleed through.

If I get time tomorrow I will test it out.

Barry.

[Gerry Leonor]

FYI: this glitch also happens with other masking elements (see my response with a screenshot & PDF a few replies above), using a fill, slab with a cover fill & text with a -1 background fill...

[Minh Nguyen]

Hi Gerard,

Thank you very much for pointing it out, I must have missed it somehow. Sorry for the mistake!

I could reproduce the issue now. It seems to confirm my assumption that the drawing's border causes some trouble with the masking effect. I will ask my colleagues to have a closer look into this. As soon as I have an answer I will let you know!

Thank you once again for the big help!

Best regards,

Minh

[Gerry Leonor]

thanks -- keep us in the loop.

we're turning a blind eye to it & hoping the bosses don't notice...& if they do, i hope they do the same...it's not really a killer bug, but it is annoying.

[Minh Nguyen]

Dear All,

Thank you very much for your help in this case so far!

I have received an explanation from the development: unfortunately, this is a known consequence of the current implementation on how the elements are drawn in the PDF export. 

In the output (PDF, print) the drawing border is not used as a clip polygon, the lines are cut shorter instead. But this causes that the line endings are visible at the end. So the line ends at the border of the drawing, but the round line ending goes out of the border.

To change this behavior, it will be a very big task. The whole area has many design questions as well, e.g. if we clip with the drawing contour, the lines that are exactly at the edge of the drawing would be visible only with half of their thickness.

Due to this, other than what Barry mentioned, we don't have any other solution for this.

I'm very sorry for the inconvenience! Please let me know if you have any further questions!

Best regards,

Minh