Revit making light washed out PDFs

[AJGKennedy]

As much as this may spark the other wonderful debate PDF vrs DWF… I wish not to get into this… :) I am only here for the issue at hand the fact we deal in document with clients and consultants who wish to have their drawings & spec… all in PDF… but we have run up against a problem in the last few months that we have been trying to find the solution…

Silly me did not think to post till now… :)

The issue is that when we print to PDF the pen weights that we see when the PDF is created do not match the look of the Revit Pen weights and shades are worse… they are lighter… in both cases they lighten up… which gives us a washed out drawing…

We have tried in two different PDF creation software programs… Adobe Reader 9 pro & Acro Plot Pro and have had the same results.

Hope that someone has seen this and may have a quick fix… This is really been a big issue… and it would be great to have it fixed..

Thanks…

[twiceroadsfool]

I would guess its a setting in the PDF plotters. Ive used Revit with CutePDF, BluBeam, PDF995, PDFcreator, and PDF Factory all with great results.

I could go through the Printer Preferences and post up all of the options. Is ICM activated? What selection is the Printer on for COlor Management? Under Device settings you may find options to convert things to gray. Are those on?

[dbaldacchino]

Are you plotting as Vector or Raster? I've noticed Raster resulting in lighter lineweights.

[AJGKennedy]

Well... I like the Vector vers Raster post... The vector plot took longer... and I remember changing our settings to raster long ago to fix another issue... missing info on our prints to the PDFs.

Will have to take another run at it and see if this problem has corrected itself since on the PDFs because the first test looks much better in vector mode.. even with the slower processing...

The file size was smaller? also...

[AJGKennedy]

I would guess its a setting in the PDF plotters. Ive used Revit with CutePDF, BluBeam, PDF995, PDFcreator, and PDF Factory all with great results.

I could go through the Printer Preferences and post up all of the options. Is ICM activated? What selection is the Printer on for COlor Management? Under Device settings you may find options to convert things to gray. Are those on?

The ICM is not activated... and it is grayed out so you can not activate it... so I do not know what that is about... but if what I noted in my earlier post with the vector creation works out... then things will be good...

Time will tell...

Thanks for your post...

[AJGKennedy]

Are you plotting as Vector or Raster? I've noticed Raster resulting in lighter lineweights.

Just an added note... after a fine tooth come over of the test print we did find a few small things missing lines that were gone that were not transferred to the PDF in the Vector mode... that did make it to the Raster mode... which is sad considering the quality is so much better...

So we can have the quality, but we have to give on the possibility of not getting the whole drawing... What fun... :(

[twiceroadsfool]

Are you working on Quad Core machines? There is an issue (or was) with Quad Cores and information dropping out of plots. But it may be the plotter drivers too.

We always plot to Vector and dont have things dropping out.

[AJGKennedy]

Are you working on Quad Core machines? There is an issue (or was) with Quad Cores and information dropping out of plots. But it may be the plotter drivers too.

We always plot to Vector and dont have things dropping out.

HP xw4600 Worstation
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU
E8400 @3.00GHz

I remember going thru all sorts of fun trying to fix this issue of the dropping lines before... in the end we changed to Raster... but is raster cost us quality... it would be nice to fix the drop lines thru other means...

[funkman]

Your views on the sheets aren't activated on the actual sheets are they?

[dbaldacchino]

I was dealing with lost elements on vector pdfs last week. They were views overlayed on a sheet. Printing to raster solved the issue but they were lighter than vector and not as crisp.

[AJGKennedy]

Your views on the sheets aren't activated on the actual sheets are they?

To easy... but this would be a no... I know what you were thinking...

[AJGKennedy]

I was dealing with lost elements on vector pdfs last week. They were views overlayed on a sheet. Printing to raster solved the issue but they were lighter than vector and not as crisp.

Now you are treading on another of my issues I posted long ago and gave up on...

Overlaid views... I thought I had them transparent at one point on my 2008 project, but I can not replicate this any more... But that is another storey...

But in this case this is not the case...

So not the problem here...

Interesting problem...

[SCShell]

Hey there,

Gotta chime in here too.....

I had a huge issue a while back and filed support requests...yada yada....

I too, had a Site Plan with an imported .dwg underlay. The Factory told me that you can not cover the center of an item with a another item, yada yada....and then they just told me to print in Rastor. Yuk!

I don't want to have to check every PDF to see if EVERY line or dimension has printed.

Autodesk needs to address this and give up on pushing DWF on us. (Just my opinion)

Steve

[dbaldacchino]

I guess if dwf prints correctly, one can print to that first and then re-print it to pdf ;) Printing used to be a no brainer. Now we have to check the output?? Nuts.

[trombe]

Hey there,

Gotta chime in here too.....

I had a huge issue a while back and filed support requests...yada yada....

I too, had a Site Plan with an imported .dwg underlay. The Factory told me that you can not cover the center of an item with a another item, yada yada....and then they just told me to print in Rastor. Yuk!

I don't want to have to check every PDF to see if EVERY line or dimension has printed.

Autodesk needs to address this and give up on pushing DWF on us. (Just my opinion)

Steve

Yo Steve,
you are not alone.
I still have PDF files with missing text or the odd line and mostly, the text, is cut off horizontally, halfway through its height.
Yip, Metanoia...I did file a support request and spent 4 months + to-ing and fro-ing with support but got no resolution to the problem..
I eventually wrote and told them to close the file because they could not resolve the Arch 2010 problem. This is the problem.
Everythng has been fine with me using FinePrint PDF Factory Pro for 4 years and a few versions, writing files out of every program I have regularly and Revit no problems until Revit 2010, when it all turned to custard (in both XP and Vista)

When everything else is working fine, its a bit rich to look for a solution outside of Revit although these things are never simple I guess.
I do hope they fix it properly soon because I am not going to be using DWF or DWFx to correct a problem with the use of PDF in my primary work tool when everyone else is using and asking for PDF files all the time.
Its very lame.

trombe