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Plotmaker Not Printing Certain Pens

Dave Jochum
Advocate
This has happened to me in the past and I can't remember what caused/fixed it. Now I'm under a deadline (of course) and it's happening again. Certain pens/colors in imported AC drawings are not printing and some lines are not printing at the correct line weight (all too fat). I have set each drawing to output in B&W, True Weight is selected, and everything else looks fine. Choosing Pens & Colors in PM does not show all the pens/colors used in the imported AC drawings. Any ideas?
Dave Jochum
J o c h u m A R C H I T E C T S http://www.jochumarchitects.com
MBP 16" (M1 Max) 64 GB•OS 13.5.2•AC 27 Silicon (latest build)
6 REPLIES 6
__archiben
Booster
try selecting the drawing that has been imported and and then go to 'pens and colours' - i think that there is an option to show those only in use in the selected drawing . . .

8.1, (and with it plotmaker 3.1), has the ability now to override the archicad penset for particular drawings and stick with those you have defined. if you tend to adjust pens in plotmaker a lot, moving to 3.1 would be a worthwhile (and free!) upgrade.

~/archiben
b e n f r o s t
b f [a t ] p l a n b a r c h i t e c t u r e [d o t] n z
archicad | sketchup! | coffeecup
Anonymous
Not applicable
8.1, (and with it plotmaker 3.1), has the ability now to override the archicad penset for particular drawings and stick with those you have defined. if you tend to adjust pens in plotmaker a lot, moving to 3.1 would be a worthwhile (and free!) upgrade.

8.0 has this ability too. What PlotMaker 3.0 doesn't seem to be able to do is remember a scale adjustment on PlotMaker that is different than the original. I hope this is fixed in 3.1, I'm still waiting for my copy.
Dave Jochum
Advocate
Yeah...I forgot to select the imported drawing before choosing Pens & Colors. So now all pens show with the correct line weights. I still can't figure out why certain pens/colors aren't printing and why some line weights are printing incorrectly.
Dave Jochum
J o c h u m A R C H I T E C T S http://www.jochumarchitects.com
MBP 16" (M1 Max) 64 GB•OS 13.5.2•AC 27 Silicon (latest build)
Ben Odonnell
Contributor
~/archiben wrote:
try selecting the drawing that has been imported and and then go to 'pens and colours' - i think that there is an option to show those only in use in the selected drawing . . .

8.1, (and with it plotmaker 3.1), has the ability now to override the archicad penset for particular drawings and stick with those you have defined. if you tend to adjust pens in plotmaker a lot, moving to 3.1 would be a worthwhile (and free!) upgrade.

~/archiben
You are right and this function works like a charm. I have tested it and used it a lot.
Ben O'Donnell
Architect and CTO at BIMobject®
Get your BIM objects from bimobject.com
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
virtual-e-home wrote:
What PlotMaker 3.0 doesn't seem to be able to do is remember a scale adjustment on PlotMaker that is different than the original. I hope this is fixed in 3.1, I'm still waiting for my copy.
Hi Brian,

Yup! Take a look at the screenshot that Ben posted above. Scale can be remembered as can layer modifications. I'm really happy that this is working. I bring in various isometrics (NTS) and scale them to fit the page, with notes/etc flowing around them - and with 3.0, they got resized after every update. Happily, they are keeping their adjusted scale/size now. 😉

Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Dave Jochum
Advocate
I finally got all drawings to print correctly--wish I knew how I did it! Since I had a fast approaching deadline I just did everything I could think of at once and hoped for the best, rather than one at a time to flesh out the culprit. I restarted my computer (and so AC), set all my imported drawings to print in B&W, and chose color as output preference in all print dialog boxes. (I previously had chosen "all colors to black" in both PM and GimpPrint dialogues--maybe GimpPrint was having trouble with these settings??)
Dave Jochum
J o c h u m A R C H I T E C T S http://www.jochumarchitects.com
MBP 16" (M1 Max) 64 GB•OS 13.5.2•AC 27 Silicon (latest build)