Printing issues

[patricks]

Anyone ever have problems printing something like a roof plan or ceiling plan or other views that are fairly graphics intensive w/ surface patterns? I have one sheet with both a roof plan (asphalt shingles) and a ceiling plan (lay-in grids). When I send to our plotter, in the print properties it says that sheet is over 24MB by itself, and after waiting at least 5 minutes it still has not started printing. If it's in the middle of the set, I pretty much can't get anything to print after that sheet.

[patricks]

I just sent that sheet by itself and it took 9 minutes before it would even start printing. :o

[sbrown]

If its a roof plan with improper settings, it takes a long time because revit has to calculate all the stuff below the roof to hide. So to speed it up, make sure you turn off everything that isn't visible, ie, ceilings, floors, walls,furn. plumbing, etc. This is true for ext. elevations also.

[RobG]

also look into updating your plotter drivers. we did that and our plots come out about 50-75% faster and WAY WAY WAY sharper looking. sounds odd i know, but when you compare plots from the old driver and the new one, it looks like two different plotters did it. and then to say the one that's nicer plotted faster gets funny looks from people..

just a thought!

[patricks]

also look into updating your plotter drivers. we did that and our plots come out about 50-75% faster and WAY WAY WAY sharper looking. sounds odd i know, but when you compare plots from the old driver and the new one, it looks like two different plotters did it. and then to say the one that's nicer plotted faster gets funny looks from people..

just a thought!

What type of plotter are you using?

We use an Oce 600 large-format laser plotter, so once it does actually start going, prints come out in about 10-15 seconds per sheet.

[RobG]

Xerox 6050 Wide Format

we upgraded the drivers about a month after getting Revit (mid December)
we all complained it was too slow and that's when they upgraded the drivers.

i used to wait a few minutes for my plots, now they're coming out by the time i get to the plotter.

[Jit]

Just a thought

Could you try and create another roof plan and try putting that to a sheet and printing


we have had fews sheets with 3d views which were giving us similar grief so by process o elimination we found that it was views that were some how corrupt

once we replaced that view , all was good.

give it a try

[patricks]

did you just duplicate the views with detailing, or duplicate and re-create all the annotations, or blow away the view entirely and create a new view and annotations all from scratch? I sure hope it's not the latter....

[Jit]

just duplicate everything including anotations

[cparsons]

OCE TDS 600 here as well. VERY slow printing. We just upgraded the OCE Controller to the latest driver and we have not noticed much of an imporvement.

So we called OCE.

The two people I talked to had vaguely heard of Revit. When we got into the discussion they pinned the trouble on the fact that the old OCE Windows Driver is rastering all of the vector information and that was making it very slow. They said that the new driver could "intelligently" divide Raster information from Vector information and that we should see a bump in performance. We not yet seen that bump.

OCE also explained that they will probably have to focus on a Revit Driver not unlike the HDI Driver for AutoCAD...but that they have not seen the demand yet.

So for you OCE lovers out there...time to call them and start hounding them about performance.

[rodneyf]

At my old office we had an Oce TDS 600 and I talked to the Oce people at both their booth at AU and over the phone to our local rep and that was about a year ago and they said that the next version would help out. Also cparsons are you plotting directly to the Oce or to file? We were able to get very good looking plots out of it as long as we plotted to file then send the files to the plotter through Reprodesk. Also as far as sending DWF files to the Oce we would good plots as long as you did not want a half size set. Hope that helps.

[cparsons]

a combination of the two. even printing to PDF/DWG is pretty slow for shaded elevations...like 5 minutes a sheet slow...

[patricks]

So one of the Oce guys was here ALL day long yesterday, from 8 till after 5.

I just tried printing that same roof plan/RCP sheet again and it came out in less than a minute. Much better.

However now I cannot print PDF's at all. When in Acrobat if I try to send a 30x42 drawing to the Oce, it says simply "The document cannot be printed" arghhhh :banghead:

I also notice that the print queue is set up rather wierd. In my list of printers there is "Oce TDS600" and there is "Oce TDS600 on TDS600". I noticed when I print a sheet from Revit, it will show up in the first queue for a few seconds, then it deletes itself (it actually says Deleting) and then it moves to the other queue, but it doesn't show the size of the print file in the other queue.

Wish we had our old Oce tech, he knew what he was donig. :(