Revit Lineweight settings and printing

[david_peterson]

So after fighting with my plotter for the last number of years I finally started to look elsewhere for things I might be able to do to get better prints and pdfs.
I started looking at the lineweight settings that I inherited.
I noticed that our thinnest pen was thinner that what we were using when producing with Autocad.
I should also mention the 11yr old plotters we're using were leased about the same time we switched from Autocad to Revit as a primary tool.
What I'm finding is that our #1 pen doesn't seem to print very good.
It looks almost halftone.

Not that I want to steal any industry secrets here, but I was hoping I might be able to get a screen shot from some others of what they're using for pen weights.
Not looking for what you're applying them to in categories or anything (although I'd love to see that example as well just to see if we're in-line)

I'm having 2 problems as the moment and can't seem to come to terms with what the best approach is.

First, our plotters we have in house don't print consistently and I need/want to fire the guys that are supposed to service it, but there's not much I can do there.
Second when I print Vector, I've always run into issues where something didn't end up on the pdfs. We do lots of complex Lab/Research buildings with tons of graphical content on our sheets. Models are big, lots of links, lots of VG overrides on things.....you name it we're probably doing it. Vector has always been the root cause of things missing on sheets. When it might be a $1 million piece of equipment, I don't want to be the guy that has to explain to management how we missed it, since it shows up on the screen, but not on the pdf. So I've been printing everything via Raster since about 2008. And back then, it was hard to tell the difference between a pdf generated by Raster vs Vector.

Somewhere between 2014 and 2016, something changed with how Revit was creating the pdf or talking to the pdf writter, or Bluebeam changed how it's reading stuff, whatever it is, Raster files really started to look like ****. And the printed version looked even worse.

So now I'm left trying to play with lineweights to see if I can get my Raster prints to look closer to my Vector prints.

Looking for info from anyone that's been seeing some of these same type of issues in recent years.

Thanks in advance.

[sam.stuckey]

David, I have essentially the same question regarding line weights and just posted it HERE (http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?79350-Revit-Best-Practices-(RBP)-Line-Patterns-amp-Line-Weights), but I think that thread may not get the same traffic that this one does here. I'm also not trying to steal trade secrets, just want somewhere to start from in creating our office standard line weights (which are ideally coming from NCS and match our firm's previous CAD standards).

In terms of the #1 line weight we had our local print shop suggest thickening that up because our hatches aren't plotting clearly, but I'm hesitant to do so, because I don't want them any thicker in our PDFs that will be viewed on screen or in Bluebeam. That said, the printed product still takes precedence in our office and maybe we shouldn't be letting the tail wag the dog in this case. Maybe I need a new print shop. . .

I don't know what to tell you about the raster/vector issue other than I've experienced the same thing with some medical equipment families not showing up in vector PDFs, but showing up in raster PDFs. Frustrating to say the least, and dangerous when it comes to expensive equipment.

[david_peterson]

We've set up our thinnest pen to be .005". The question I'm looking for is where to you start to bump and how much should you bump as you go to the larger scales (1/16, 3/32, 1/32...)
There seems to be a nice progression on the out of the box version where the larger the scale you're pens all start be become the same weight.
We chose the .005" based on what we used to do with Cad.
I'm still thinking that's a little light. I've recently bumped that up to .0055".
I'm not so much looking for a new print shop as I am for the print shop to provide us with a new plotter. (Current ones are 10yrs old and have had just about everything replaced by the casters on the bottom)
We did see some really nice prints out of the new KIP plotters from a shop downtown.
I'd love to get one of those in here, but again, my hands are tied.