Steph Posted April 25, 2012 Share Posted April 25, 2012 Instead of printing straight from VW we export to PDF & print from that. Sometimes when I make a PDF and plot it & there is a strange line or two going accross the page in the printed drawing but I can't see that line on my PDF. Most of the time it's fine, but randomly this will happen and the 'line(s)' are different every time. Is this a PDF, plotter or VW problem??? Any suggestions? Quote Link to comment
Uli Posted April 25, 2012 Share Posted April 25, 2012 Hi Steph, I have problems with transparency in pdf sometimes, I get white rectangles around a transparent symbol. The best results I get when I print a pdf with the option "Rasterize print output" VW 2010 Landmark Quote Link to comment
Steph Posted April 25, 2012 Author Share Posted April 25, 2012 When do you use that function; when exporting the PDF from VW or when you actually plot the drawing? I have an option to rasterize text when I export from VW, but I can't find any such option in my ptinting options. Quote Link to comment
Uli Posted April 25, 2012 Share Posted April 25, 2012 (edited) I thought you have also the option to print to pdf. "Instead of printing straight from VW we export to PDF". I was not so lucky with the export option, so I experimented with the print pdf option, there you can find the rasterize option. But even that option sometimes has problems with transperency on my system. Hope that helps I don't know maybe it is also a Landmark feature and not inside the Fundamental Version. Edited April 25, 2012 by Uli Quote Link to comment
Steph Posted April 25, 2012 Author Share Posted April 25, 2012 I've only tried 'exporting' to PDF. The only time I 'printed' to PDF, with a different drawing, it made my whole drawing look like a Picasso painting and it permanently altered the VW file so that no matter how I exported or printed it after that it always turned out like the Picasso painting. So now as a rule we never 'print' to PDF because it seems to cause way worse problems! But I will try it on a copy of the file with the printing option you suggested and see if that fixes it. Thanks for your help! Quote Link to comment
IanH Posted April 27, 2012 Share Posted April 27, 2012 I believe that the problem is that some printers do not understand transparency so a number of work arounds are used, not always 100% successfully. The proper solution is for printing technology to catch up and implement a reliable rendition of transparency but in the meantime there are some workarounds to reduce the issue. It's all in the knowledgbase and detailed towards the bottom of the article. Quote Link to comment
Chris D Posted May 15, 2012 Share Posted May 15, 2012 After years of suffering this transparency printing problem I chanced across a solution that works on several of our problem files. Converting to PDF doesn't solve the issue, but if you convert the PDF to PostScript and then back to PDF, it will flatten the PDF and get rid of the problem. You'll need the full version of Acrobat to do it (File>Export>PostScript). Quote Link to comment
bcd Posted May 20, 2012 Share Posted May 20, 2012 Very interesting Chris - I've been looking for method to flatten vector data in pdf for while now and this sounds very promising. Quote Link to comment
Benson Shaw Posted May 20, 2012 Share Posted May 20, 2012 Does Vectorworks EPSF export flatten the data and/or help with transparency issues? -B Quote Link to comment
Chris D Posted May 31, 2012 Share Posted May 31, 2012 This PostScript thing has worked for us on several files now, but we've discovered a limitation....it can corrupt gradients for some reason. We don't use gradients very often so it isn't a problem to us. Quote Link to comment
Christiaan Posted May 31, 2012 Share Posted May 31, 2012 The proper solution is for printing technology to catch up and implement a reliable rendition of transparency but in the meantime there are some workarounds to reduce the issue. I disagree. Nemetschek know this is a limitation of current printing protocols and effectively choose to ignore it by only outputting live transparency. They can correct me if I'm wrong but Nemetschek need to provide some sort of flattened transparency option, as other well-known graphics programs do. Quote Link to comment
Ajychau Posted August 2, 2012 Share Posted August 2, 2012 Sometimes when I make a PDF and plot it & there is a strange line or two going accross the page in the printed drawing but I can't see that line on my PDF. Most of the time it's fine, but randomly this will happen and the 'line(s)' are different every time. Is this a PDF, plotter or VW problem??? Any suggestions? We occasionally get this problem as well. What we have found is that it is usually attributed to a polyline that is fairly big and attempting to close itself. Happens with contours and similar large polyline objects. You can sometimes detect them when you zoom in close it might fill in or momentarily show a closed polyline. Polygons are usually better to work with in this case, you can convert it to a polygon by decomposing the offending line and composing it again... But otherwise you'll have to somehow turn the PDF into an image file and back to PDF again... Quote Link to comment
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