Printing Transparency

[Thomas Wagensommerer]

Printing transparency with Postscript causes artifacts and missing objects. There is a technical note in the knowledgebase dealing with this issue. This technote seems not up to date any more, but the printing problems are still there, exactly as described in the technote.

This happens on:

OS X 10.8.5

Vectorworks 2015 SP4

any postscript printer

[Thomas Wagensommerer]

The attached files do not print correctly on any of the laser printers I tried so far.

The printout shows a rectangular region of different grey around the small diagonal rectangle and some lines around the small diagonal rectangle are faded out. A pdf file created from the Vectorworks file shows the same problem. Display on screen is OK for both files.

Does anybody see the same problem? I would be grateful for any feedback, so I can find out if the problem is specific to Vectorworks, the operating system, printer driver or printer model.

So far I tried:

OS X 10.8.5

Vectorworks 2015 SP3

Vectorworks 2015 SP4

Problematic printers:

Sharp MX-2600N (Postscript laser printer)

Sharp MX-2640N (Postscript laser printer)

Kyocera FS-C5100N (Postscript-clone laser printer)

This printer prints OK:

HP DesignJet T1100 (HPGL inkjet printer)

[Thomas Wagensommerer]

I have researched the transparency issue a little bit further and it turns out this is a know problem:

It appears, that different applications deal with it in different ways. This, for instance, is an excerpt from the adobe acrobat manual:

"If a document contains transparent objects, Acrobat flattens the document before printing it. Flattening removes transparency information and converts images to a format the printer can interpret. Adjust the transparency flattening to determine if transparency is causing the problem.

- If you print to an inkjet printer, drag the Raster/Vector Balance slider to the lowest setting.

- If you print to a PostScript printer, drag the Raster/Vector Balance slider to the highest setting."

It seems Vectorworks also needs "transparency flattening". Reading the "Printing Transparency" technote, Vectorworks should have a similar option called "Rasterize print output", but it seems this is not available in my combination of operating system and Vectorworks version.

[rDesign]

So do you not have the 'Rasterize Print Output' option as shown at 0:35 in the following YouTube video?

[Thomas Wagensommerer]

No, 'Rasterize Print Output' and other options are missing.

[PVA - Admin]

When you say a PDF created from Vectorworks also had the issue, you did a File > Print > Saves as PDF or File > Export > Export PDF?

Does the same issue happen with both types of PDF creation?

[Thomas Wagensommerer]

Hi Jim,

thank you for coming back to me.

File > Print > Saves as PDF and File > Export > Export PDF both yield the exact same result.

By the way, there is a menuitem File > Export > Export PDF (Quarz only), which is greyed out.

[PVA - Admin]

Make sure to get in touch with support directly about this one, they will likely want the original VWX file as well as those PDFs to test:

http://www.vectorworks.net/international/

[PVA - Admin]

Should have included for general board knowledge:

The reason he is not seeing Rasterize Print Output is that you only see that option on a Mac with Quartz Imaging disabled. (On Windows you see it regardless)

As of Vectorworks 2015, you cannot disable Quartz Imaging on a Mac any longer (This change was forced by changes to OS X, unfortunately) and as a result, the workarounds of rasterizing print output as well as some of the others are no longer available to adapt to PostScript printers.

However, if the issue is visible even in the Exported PDF, then there might be other things that can be done to work with the printer, but support will have to go through it directly.