Inconsistent and glitchy prints

[Christiaan]

We have this problem of inconsistencies in our prints when printing to our Canon CLC 4040, particularly elevation type drawings. See attached scan, which is a good example; most of the time the problem is far more subtle.

We've had everything replaced in the printer (including mother board and graphics card) and all firmware and drivers are up to date.

The problem occurs when printing from Vectorworks or when printing a PDF produced by Vectorworks (v2008).

Has anyone else run into this type of printing inconsistency?

[islandmon]

Are you printing from the RAM or the Spool. This looks like a Spool File issue.

If printing from the Spool while other processes are running , sometimes disc latency

will corrupt the page-out and the printer gets ahead of the spool as the RAM is being refreshed.

Does the printer have sufficient RAM ( 32-64mb ) .. if so then avoid the spool.

If you must use the spool then avoid using the computer while printing.

Are you printing from the network with the spool on a different LAN drive ?

If so then network latency may be the culprit.

[Christiaan]

I don't think it's anything to do with that islandmon. The inconsistencies are quite consistent, whether printing from a networked machine or printing directly from one of the print engineer's laptops connected directly to the machine via the printers own software. The printer also has 1024 MB of RAM.

One thing that helps (but has its own problems) is checking the "Print As Image" advanced option when printing from Acrobat.

The problems appears to have some relation to vector graphics and maybe layers. Patterns are worse but the the problem occurs with hatches too.

[Christiaan]

Here's another example. This time it's printed directly from Vectorworks and at 1200 dpi. I've marked it up with comments too.

[Christiaan]

I never thought to do this before but here's an example that really puts the ball in NNA's court I think. It's printed to a different printer (so different drivers) from a PDF exported from VW.

It's showing the same inconsistencies.

[Christiaan]

Here's an original PDF if anybody would like to try on their printers.

[M.CH]

Christiaan,

Have you got someone in the office using autocad style fills?

Looking at this detail, this may be situation

[Christiaan]

No, the fill in the bit you single out is an ordinary VW-based pattern via the Attributes palette.

[JuanP]

Christian, could you send us the VW file and screenshots of the page and print setup.

Thanks,

Juan Almansa

jalmansa@vectorworks.net

[islandmon]

Downloaded your pdf and opened in Acrobat Pro 7. Looks perfect on Display.

But printed to HP with the issues you have noted.

Console gave this error:

____

2009-01-29 18:21:56.861 Acrobat[388] WARNING: _wrapRunLoopWithAutoreleasePoolHandler got kCFRunLoopExit, but there are no autorelease pools in the stack.

[Christiaan]

Email sent Juan, thanks.

Islandmon, thanks for that. Any ideas what the error means?

[Christiaan]

This example is more subtle but is hatches only. No patterns.

You can see where I've marked it up there's kind of blurring of some sections.

By the way, these problems exist whether I print to PDF or export to PDF.

[Christiaan]

This is quite interesting. This is a "print to postscript" file. Open this up on Mac OS X and it will be converted to a PDF and viewed in Preview.app. Once opened in Preview you and see the inconsistencies on screen.

The forum wouldn't let me to upload a file with a ps suffix, so I changed it to txt. You'll need to change it back to ps before opening.

[islandmon]

The problem may be with your CUPS installation which is used by VWX to describe the page.

http://www.cups.org/

Current version is 1.4 compatible with OSX10.5.6.

See the >documentation>whats new.

[islandmon]

To view the CUPS error log:

http://localhost:631/admin/log/error_log

[Christiaan]

Updated from 1.3.8 to 1.3.9 but problem still occurs. Couldn't find a binary for version 1.4

[brudgers]

Unreliable printing is one of the major reasons I can't trust Vectorworks.

I've purchased many software applications over the past 22 years, and Vectorworks is the first I've encountered with unreliable printing.

Forget about the stair tool and parametric design for the next release. Fix the core code.

[Dexie]

I printed the file on a OKI9800 and get similar results with fading in random rectangular areas. We occasionally get a VW drawing that causes this when we use transparency but it is not a consistant problem.

[monkey]

i have had the same problem effecting certain areas of a plan, have never worked out what it is though!

[Christiaan]

So it looks like we're stuck with this crap and I have to tell my boss and everyone at work that it's a problem with Vectorworks and it won't be fixed.

This is unacceptable. Producing these elevations is half of our business.

I can't even say whether the problem is fixed in v2009 either because I'm unable to test printing and PDF exports.

[monkey]

i had one plan in particular which was just a line drawing and certain sections of the plan showed the lines as almost double the line weight but really fuzzy, no matter what i did i couldnt get rid of it, i think the only thing that eventually worked was copying and pasting into a new file, but this was time consuming and very annoying.

I cant understand why a simple line drawing with only polygons would do this, no colour or anything.

I havent had it for a while, but im sure it will raise its ugly head sooner or later

[Christiaan]

Official word from Engineering:

"The Mac OS, or the printer driver, are not producing the correct print output. It seems to only affect PostScript printers. This has been reported to HP and Apple and is pending resolution."

How did I know that was going to be the answer, lol!

[panta rhei]

I wonder what HP can do to your Canon printer, Christiaan!

[brudgers]

That would explain the problems with Windows printing using HPGL2.

[Christiaan]

I wonder what HP can do to your Canon printer, Christiaan!

Haha, yes, I didn't even bother to read that far...