Patterns Corrupted

[mpkeane]

I am working on a Mac PowerBook, using OS 10.4.11, with VW Designer (Educational Version) 12.5.1.

I made a drawing of a garden that includes many areas of different patterns (groundcovers, lawn, gravel paths, etc). The patterns were filled into various polygon/polyline areas. They all look fine on my monitor.

I made a Batch PDF of different viewports (3 different scales from 1" = 20' to 1/4" = 1' 0") and the PDFs all look fine on my monitor. So far so good.

I took the PDFs to my local Kinkos and printed them out on their large plotter (Os? TDS450). None of the patterns printed as patterns. Some became solid fields of light gray (3 different shades). Other patterns turned in heavy black bars (stripes).

Is this a known problem? Is this the particular plotter, or PDFs? (would JPEGs be better?)

Marc

[islandmon]

This is a known problem with VW>Postscript>PDF and the way various drivers rasterize the code.

For best results use either vectorize-able Hatches , rasterize-able Image Fills or Solid Fills.

[Guest]

.. or checkmark "Print patterns at on-screen resolution" in the Export PDF dialog.

[mpkeane]

Katie, I did use the "Print patterns at on-screen resolution" in the Export PDF dialog but still got the bad results. My HP inkjet prints just fine (up to 8.5 x 11!) but on the large format Oc? plotter, patterns were awful.

Islandmon, I take it vectorize-able Hatches are those put in through the Modify>Hatch menu rather than through the Attributes palette. I noticed that Attributes palette hatches do not rescale when the drawing is rescaled and get all blown out in detail drawings. Modify>Hatch seems to rescale.

Using Modify>Hatch is slower than using the Attributes palette but the way to go I guess.

Marc