Colman Stephenson

I am experiencing significant colour shifts when creating PDFs from Vectorwork 8.5. We are running a ColorSync workflow on G4s running VW, Quark, Photoshop and Acrobat, among others. We have profiled our Laserprinter and use that CMYK Profile as our CMYK workspace. We use Adobe RGB as our RGB Workspace. I have set up Distiller with the above information. When I produce a PDF from Quark there is no colour shift. When I produce a PDF from VW there are significant colour shifts, particularly in the blue/green region. This ruinings all the work our architects have undertaken when trying to create a beautiful drawing. We need to create PDFs in order to place the drawings in Quark documents. We have found EPSs to be unreliable, whether produced from the Export EPS option, or via the Print dialogue box. Can anyone help me with this? KEY QUESTIONS Does VW take any notice of the content of the ColorSync Control Panel when printing/exporting? Does VW output colour info in RGB or CMYK? Is there a way I can find out the format of the colour info in a postscript file? Anyone who helps solve this will get a big present, regardless where they are in the world Colman StephensonJulian Harrap ArchitectsLondon, UK

this problem is new to me. In what way 'messing around'. I've never had a problem printing postscript from Macs/VW to laser printers

For some reason when I print my arrows they appear a slightly different shade then the line on which they depend. They appear OK on screen but print differently. Any ideas why? Mac 9.0, VW 8.5 to a Colour laser printer.

I think Brian has a point. All of this can be done with the printer driver. When we are printing to a plotter (via Microspot Raster) we use Dither: Bayer (page setup) and Black Ink (Print). Coloured lines and grey lines then print as grey using a half tone pattern. The 400dpi is result is almost excellent. I'm sure we would be very happy with 600dpi. When we a print via Postscript we use our colour printer to achieve nice greys (monochrome lasers are terrible at this, admittedly). Reverb, you'll hate this question: why is it necessary to use class colour to differentiate line weights? Doesn't Zoom line weight do the same thing? [set-up MacOS 9, VW 8.5]

Thanks for that suggestion Matthew C

Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't have Illustrator (maybe I should) C

I understand that Mac OS X provides dual processing capabilities to all applications so this issue will come to a close when VW for Mac OS X appears (which will be a while, it seems) Colman Stephenson ------------------ Colman Stephenson Julian Harrap Architects, UK

I frequently have problems exporting image files. This post is specifically about EPS. I often get unexpected lines and shapes which are totally different from the vectorworks drawing. Interestingly the EPS preview comes out correctly, although the eps is wrong, which can be verified by printing it or MacGSView A sample set of files can be found at: www.colman.stephenson.org/vwepsproblem.zip This includes the VW 8.5.2 file, the eps and a tif from the VW file. Set-up: VW 8.5.2 on OS 9.1 on a range of G4s and iMacs Can anyone help? ------------------ Colman Stephenson Julian Harrap Architects, UK

I regularly have problems exporting image files and am very glad to hear that I am not alone. Some times images have random boundaries, unrelated to the page set-up or the objects (that I can find). Worse, sometimes objects are missing or distorted. This happens in around 10-20% of my exported images and both on iMacs and G4's. I have tried updating my Quicktime to v5. This seemed to make things a little better. While I haven't been able to solve the issue one of the problems is often memory. Exporting TIFFS, JPEGS and EPS (the formats I need) usually needs around ten times the size of the final image size. Is NNA aware of these problems? Set-up: VW8.5.2 on OS 9.0.4 on a Mac network.

The imagecels ones are nice, but they all seem to be outdoors in bright sunlights. Where can I get some people indoors in less contrasty light? C. ------------------ Colman Stephenson Julian Harrap Architects, UK

Can anyone help me source 2D photo-realistic human figures for placement in scenes rendered in Renderworks or Artlantis. I'm thinking of a CD-ROM or something. Grateful for any suggestions. ------------------ Colman Stephenson Julian Harrap Architects, UK

While this particular problem have never occured I often have difficulty exporting image files from VW 8.5.2 especially TIFF and JPEG. EPS is more reliable. With the bitmap formats huge amounts of memory seem to be necessary (perhaps 10 times the VW file size and the image file size). Even with that images are sometimes scrambled or have very large extents that do not seem to relate to the page position or the objects in the drawing. I did find upgrading to Quicktime 5 seemed to address some of the problems. Colman ------------------ Colman Stephenson Julian Harrap Architects, UK

Robert Thanks for your response. Unfortunately all too often I find the exporting (and importing) of image files into VW unreliable. The following link will download you two files, a VW file and the resultant Jpeg which is badly garbled. This sort of problem affects TIFFS also. Sometimes the imported image is curiously and randomly cropped. Is this something to do with exporting VW files which themselves have imported image files? http://www.colman.stephenson.org/NNA/1914.zip I am using VW 8.5.2, QT 5, OS 9.0.1 on G4s and iMacs. These problems also existed when using QT 4 Thanks for your help ------------------ Colman Stephenson Julian Harrap Architects, UK

I am drawing a filled polyline over an imported TIFF. It is on an upper layer set to Overlay. Thus the details of the tiff show through the filled object. This is how I want it. However when I come to print the layer mode acts like Paint: ie I cannot see the tiff through the object as I can on the screen. I am using VW 8.5.2 on Mac OS 9.0.4 on G4 with loads of memory. Printing with Laserwriter 8. Very grateful for any advice. Colman Stephenson ------------------ Colman Stephenson Julian Harrap Architects, UK

On attempting to reproduce the problem I haven't gotten the badly garbled jpegs that I did earlier. However I have created an example where an export from the this file ftp.colman.stephenson.org/SSGB%20CONCEPT%20OPTION%20H Produced a jpeg: ftp.colman.stephenson.org/SSGB%20CONCEPT%20OPTION%20H.JPG that was not the same dimensions as the current printable area and truncated at the top. A Screenshot of the printable area can be found at: ftp.colman.stephenson.org/Picture%204 I am finding exporting jpegs unpredictable while exporting TIFFs (for example, from this file) quickly runs into memory errors. I have 160/202Mb of built-in/virtual RAM. 48Mb to VW. I am running 9.0 and VW 8.5.2 with, as mentioned QT5 Colman ------------------ Colman Stephenson Julian Harrap Architects, UK