Printing fills - Issues with appearance

[Kathryn W]

I have been trying unsuccessfully to print internal elevations that match what I see on the screen.
I have created some percentage fills (as solid fills with 50% and 15% opacity) and allocated them to specific materials. These appear fine on screen, however when I attempt to print them, the fills are pixelated and generally unusable.
I have attached a file showing what I see on screen compared to what is printed either as pdf or directly from a laser printer.
Anyone able to advise if this is an archicad issue or a print issue and either way how I can amend it would be greatly appreciated!

[Barry Kelly]

You mention printing to PDF or directly to a printer.
I have found that printing to an external PDF printer (i.e. Adobe or one of the many other PDF printers) or directly to a physical printer does not reproduce the % fills properly.

It is best to publish them to the built-in PDF converter.
i.e. create a publisher set that "saves" the file in the PDF format.

Barry.

[Kathryn W]

Thanks Barry,

The problem that I have with publishing PDF's through the internal Archicad publisher is that if I have an A1 drawing, it publishes fine and the fills publish fine and if I then get it printed at A1 it is fine, however, if I print that pdf at a reduced size (ie on A3 or A4 paper) most of the fine lines and patterned fills do not print.

This is an issue with our office as we produce all our drawings on A1, usually at 1:50 which means that we can print these drawings on A3 and they are at 1:100, good as a reference for us or for others to print without having to get an A1 printed, however not good if the finer lines do not print.

Have you experienced this as an issue?

[Barry Kelly]

I can't say I have ever tried printing a PDF at a reduced scale.
I don't work at such a large scale on large sheets.

You could create a second set of views at a smaller scale (simply drag a copy of the viewset andchange it's scale) and place this on a second set of layouts with a smaller page size and then publish this for you checking.
You would still only do the actual modelling and documenting once but it would mean maintaining two view sets and two layout groups and two publisher sets.

I can't see any way of publishing an existing layout at a reduced size which is what would be ideal in this case.

Barry.