One of those days - VWX to PDF drama

[Jeff Prince]

A real mystery here….

I have a model with 17 Sheets depicting a large subdivision.  All of the sheets were spawn from the same template.  All of the viewports were created in rapid succession with the same viewport attributes.  All of the plan viewports display a series of design layers with the same class and attribute settings for depicted objects.  Some aerials with various 2D graphics stacked on top.  Everything was working just fine for the first round of publishing and printing.   I put the project away for a week or so.

Problem:

I just opened it up, made a few changes to the arrangement of some objects in design layers, and republished.  The resulting PDF looks fine, but fails to print one of the sheets, which had no changes to it other than title block and legend updates.  It had published and printed fine previously.  No oddities observed during publish, just during print from Adobe Acrobat. It seems to get hung up while “flattening” the graphics during the print process in Adobe.  Unfortunately, I am not authorized to share the files.

 

troubleshooting steps taken thus far:

took the resulting PDF and broke it into single sheets, same problem.

 

republished just the offending sheet, same problem.

verified all class and design layer settings were identical for all viewports.

 

verified all page setups were identical. 
 

made four copies of the sheet layer and in each copy deleteted everything except for one object (title block, keymap viewport, legend viewport and plan viewport respectively).

republished each of these copies to observe which might be causing the issue.

Working theory 

It appears to be confined to the plan viewport on this particular sheet, which had no changes to the viewport or objects within the particular viewport.  Recreating the sheet from scratch does not exhibit the problem.  I believe the issue is related to the polygon shaped viewport crop somehow.  It has a dozen verticies used to create an irregular sheet view.  I’ve used the same technique on similar sheets in this set and in many projects over the years.

 

Question

why might this happen and what have I overlooked in troubleshooting?  Have you had similar experiences?

 

[michaelk]

Can you use the OS to make a PDF of just that page?

 

File>Print>PDF>Save as PDF

 

 

[Jeff Prince]

1 minute ago, michaelk said:

Can you use the OS to make a PDF of just that page?

 

File>Print>PDF>Save as PDF

 

 

Did that too.  One interesting note.  The sheet will print from Microsoft Edge, Adobe is the one who can’t get things on paper, it transmits this problem sheet to the printer, but a blank page kicks out.  Seems like it is something with how Vectoworks handles layered graphics when writing the PDF, which then trips up Acrobat during the printing process.  Adobe is being picky, as I just printed from a Mac using Preview.

 

Incidentally, I had a similar thing happen with AutoCAD last year with graphically detailed hatched and other layered graphics.  I wonder if this is an anomaly with how these CAD packages author layered graphics and then Abode choking on it.  Simpler PDF software seems to manage draw order more efficiently.

[digitalcarbon]

13 hours ago, jeff prince said:

but fails to print

can you print to jpg then convert to pdf?  I hate when this stuff happens...turns a quick "yea I can get that to you" into a slugfest.

[Jeff Prince]

24 minutes ago, digitalcarbon said:

can you print to jpg then convert to pdf?  I hate when this stuff happens...turns a quick "yea I can get that to you" into a slugfest.

Yes, but that ultimately doesn’t solve the greater issue or make a very lightweight file 😞