mabrey
2008-04-04, 07:20 PM
Hello,
Recently I have been having issues with halftone text (or any other light color) not printing correctly, and most of the time not at all. As an example, on a drawing I had the existing elements and annotations halftone for clarity. Everything looks great in the print preview window, but the actual plot is missing the existing element text in notes and tags. It was really strange, because the leader lines and other annotation borders were printing halftone, but the text was not printing at all. I tried fiddling with all of the settings; raster/vector, greyscale, black&white, color, etc., and everytime I got the same results: no text visible at halftone settings or light colors.
The next step I tried was to print to a dwf or pdf file, and once again everything looked correct in the program, but once plotted, light text was missing. Finally, I printed to a plt file, and used our KIP requester/viewer program to see what the plot would look like before printed. Sure enough, the halftone text was missing in the viewer as well, so I knew there would be no point in printing it.
After discussing this with our IT and support guys, we discovered the reason for my printing woes. I was told that a lot of programs have issues with printing light colored text on scales less than 100%. Since I was plotting half size drawings directly from Revit or half size files to pdf, dwf, and plt, the text was not printing correctly. The solution: print to a file full size, and then use the file's program to print half size. I tried this with our KIP requester program, and sure enough it previewed perfectly and printed perfectly. :)
Sorry for the life story on printing, but I just thought I would share this, and see if others have had the same problem and solution or similar problems/solutions.
-Jon
Recently I have been having issues with halftone text (or any other light color) not printing correctly, and most of the time not at all. As an example, on a drawing I had the existing elements and annotations halftone for clarity. Everything looks great in the print preview window, but the actual plot is missing the existing element text in notes and tags. It was really strange, because the leader lines and other annotation borders were printing halftone, but the text was not printing at all. I tried fiddling with all of the settings; raster/vector, greyscale, black&white, color, etc., and everytime I got the same results: no text visible at halftone settings or light colors.
The next step I tried was to print to a dwf or pdf file, and once again everything looked correct in the program, but once plotted, light text was missing. Finally, I printed to a plt file, and used our KIP requester/viewer program to see what the plot would look like before printed. Sure enough, the halftone text was missing in the viewer as well, so I knew there would be no point in printing it.
After discussing this with our IT and support guys, we discovered the reason for my printing woes. I was told that a lot of programs have issues with printing light colored text on scales less than 100%. Since I was plotting half size drawings directly from Revit or half size files to pdf, dwf, and plt, the text was not printing correctly. The solution: print to a file full size, and then use the file's program to print half size. I tried this with our KIP requester program, and sure enough it previewed perfectly and printed perfectly. :)
Sorry for the life story on printing, but I just thought I would share this, and see if others have had the same problem and solution or similar problems/solutions.
-Jon