Printing Fills to Canon CLC3200

[ff1 0]

VW12.0.1 on iMac G5 OSX 10.4. When printing a drawing using fills the pattterns do not print correctly on a Canon CLC3200 colour lazer printer - i.e. fills print as shades of solid colours but diagonal patterns, cross hatches and dotted fills are not visible. Printing resolution in Doc Prefs is set to default 72dpi.

Also, it is not possible to print transparent layers (print as solid), whereas this works fine on an inkjet printer. Any solutions?

[Christiaan 750]

Dunno if this will help but turn your resolution up to 300dpi

Make sure you've got the latest print driver. 2.1 I believe:

http://software.canon-europe.com/Profess...0C1_v210073.asp

Also, long shot, but you might try Printing to PDF by "Save PDF as Postscript" then open the postcript file in Preview.app and save as PDF, then print it.

[ff1 0]

Thanks Christiaan, but no luck - I'd already experimented with the printing resolution with no luck. The same problem occurs printing to our Oc? large format B+W plotter - shades but no fill patterns.

Your PDF approach reveals an interesting aspect however - the PDF appears to have only solid colours also, until one zooms in to say 500% and there the patterned fill are! But they are such a fine resolution that they print out like solid colours - even on a 1200dpi laser printer.

I'd be sorry to loose the ability to use these fill patterns, particularly as they are in many drawings created before upgrading to VW12. Anyone got any further suggestions?

[Drake 1]

Try using the Gimp Drivers, we had the same problem but when we used the latest Gimp drivers it cleared up the problem

[ff1 0]

Clc3200 and Oce plotter not fully supported by Gimp printers, so we'd loose a lot of functions for these machines. I was hoping that a solution within VW was possible, as it looks to be due to some change introduced in version 12.

[Christiaan 750]

What about turning Quartz Imaging and Anti-aliasing off or on in the Display Preferences?

[ff1 0]

Very good Christiaan - turning Quartz Imaging OFF results in printing fill patterns correctly. Interesting to see that with Quartz on and anti-aliasing off it is possible to achieve transparency (for "overlay" layers), but fill patterns are lost. Transparency also works with anti-aliasing on but not as well.

In general we'll turn Quartz Imaging off, which gives us fill patterns and much quicker printing! Thanks for your help.

[Christiaan 750]

Great, glad you were able to sort it out.

[ff1 0]

As a follow up, in looking in the manual to see what the purpose of Quartz Imaging is, I noticed the following info for Mac users: In the Print dialogue box select Vectorworks in the drag down menu and select "Enable special processing for transparent color bitmaps" - this allows transparent overlay layers to print on a Postscript printer.