PRINTING LINE WEIGHT PROBLEM

[Mieke Strand]

Hi,

I am new to Vectorworks, and I have been having a problem getting my line weights to print consistently. We have VW 12, running on a Mac with 10.4 Tiger.

I have a drawing, which I saved as a pdf and sent to a print shop to be printed. The plot came back looking exactly as it had on my monitor, which was what I wanted.

I then edited the drawing (not changing any of the line weights) and tried printing the same drawing on our Epson Color Stylus 1280. All of the line weights appeared significantly heavier (heavier than they appear on the screen and heavier than they appeared in the print-out I got from the print shop).

I couldn't get the drawing to print as it appeared on-screen using our printer, so I sent it back to the print shop (again as a pdf). It came back looking exactly like the copy that came off of our printer--with very heavy line weights.

Any thoughts on why this would happen? My ultimate goal is simply to have my prints look like my drawing on-screen, which they did only the first time I tried to print.

Thanks,

Mieke

[altoids]

This doesn't sound like a VW problem.

Did the printshop use the same printer for the two PDF prints? Was it the same PDF file? Setting VW to plot in color and B&W can also alter the appearance of the plots.

Different printers will print the same line differently, particularly for non PostScript printers, like the 1280. Set your line weights to match your preferred printer's output.

[Guest]

Did you turn off Quartz imaging, by any chance?

Are all the lines thicker, or only non-horizontal and non-vertical lines?