Printing and Publishing

[hollister design Studio]

I did a quick search and it doesn't seem like this have been brought up since 2002.

 

1. Background printing/publishing  should be available on VW.

 

We've got a Epson  24" SureColor T3170 wide-format - and it does take a couple of minutes to spool up each page...

On a 10 sheet doc that's a lot of time to be locked out of VW - can't even open a new file until everything is finished.

 

 

2. It would be more efficient to have ALL pages spool together when publishing.

When publishing to a printer, VW spools and previews each sheet individually so you can't even leave the office to 'let it work'.

With Autodesk  when you publish to a printer it spools up ALL of the pages together for preview and approval as a whole.

You approve the job and walk away.

 

 

 

[Jeff Prince]

@hollister design Studio curious why you don’t publish to pdf and print from the PDF in a better print manager.  I used to do that with AutoCAD too, better quality and faster output.

[Pat Stanford]

It actually sounds like at least partially a printer driver problem.

 

When I print to my Canon 2525 laser printer (11x17), it all spools at once. If you are having to submit each job individually it is not a VW problem, but rather an Epson problem.

[hollister design Studio]

@jeff prince I've usually found that printing natively from the creating applications are the best quality... Photoshop, InDesign, AutoCAD.

I got MUCH cleaner lines natively from AutoCAD than after acrobat got ahold of it!

 

If you think Acrobat (or some other print manager?) has better quality than native VW I'll give that a try.

Does ad an extra step or two (and another app) to get something out the door.

 

Plus when I was purchasing they (sales people) really push the idea that VW is an 'all in one' app - 'no need to go out to any other program!'

 

 

@Pat Stanford Seems you might be right.

 

To be clear, I don't have to submit each job individually - the Publish menu publishes the whole doc as one just fine.

But then VW sends each page separately to the printer - instead of combining them as most other software seems to do.

This means instead of approving the whole document at once in the Epson preview window, we have to approve a single sheet, let it print, then approve the next sheet, let it print, etc.

And during all this we can't work on anything as VW is locked out because of no background printing.

 

 

I'll move to printing to PDF, and then printing from Acrobat or InDesign (both of which spool as expected) so I don't have these issues.

Just a shame that the native print manager doesn't  'just work' like the other software packages we use.

[Jeff Prince]

@hollister design Studio I'm in the habit of printing to PDF for ipad markup, email, archiving prints, and actual printing purposes.  I don't know why, but Vectorworks files have always looked better via the PDF route rather than direct to printer in my experience with HP large format printers and typical office printers.  I use the publish command and it cranks out a nice multipage PDF set.  Never found it to be a bother to open the PDF in another program to print as it gives you a second look at the drawing before committing it to paper.  Back in the pen plotter days, this would have been a great feature to have had 🙂

[hollister design Studio]

I always publish to PDF too - for email, records and to send to a print service for pickup.

And with the way VW handles printing  I will no longer be doing that!

 

I was frustrated this morning when I had to wait through over 20 minutes (!!!) for a print job to go through that I could not cancel as I had neglected to save the file before I hit Ctrl+P... and it wasn't the first time I've been stuck in the VW print space loop.

 

Of course if we had background printing I wouldn't have been as frustrated.

 

Live and learn.

 

(Usually after doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results🙂)