PDF Plot output.... Printing PDF to paper

[Steven P]

Good evening,

(Sunday night here, so obviously about time to look at the thing I said I would look at for Monday morning)

 

So I have some drawings... a full project worth... plotted to PDF and they all look good on the PDF on the screen. Sent these to be printed on paper for site, and some of the objects are coming out very feint - professional printers who normally are very good. Plotting DWG to paper on the printer in the home office they look OK, plotting DWG to PDF and the PDF looks OK, plotting PDF to paper and the objects are also feint in the home office. This is happening mtext, test, lines, polylines, whatever... generally its happening to coloured lines, black is OK.

 

So looking at the problem... PDF to paper very feint colours.

In AutoCAD tried: New plot style, standard acad plot style, 'none' plot style, project plot style, tried different colour shades, checked line weights and widths, and just about everything I can think of, apart from 1 obviously.... so what can that 1 thing be... I'm stumped...

 

What would cause a PDF that looks good on the screen to print with some of the colours to be feint

 

 

Thanks for any suggestions,

 

[BIGAL]

Try 1st change to Autocad PDF High quality print maybe. There may be a dpi setting increase somewhere also.

 

Have found like you some colors change maybe they can be set to rgb you can edit the ctb saves as a copy Mypdf.ctb. lee-mac has color lisp so you put in number a rgb will come back

 

;; ACI -> RGB  -  Lee Mac
;; Args: c - [int] ACI (AutoCAD Colour Index) Colour (1<=c<=255)

(defun LM:ACI->RGB ( c / o r )
    (if (setq o (vla-getinterfaceobject (LM:acapp) (strcat "autocad.accmcolor." (substr (getvar 'acadver) 1 2))))
        (progn
            (setq r
                (vl-catch-all-apply
                   '(lambda ( )
                        (vla-put-colorindex o c)
                        (list (vla-get-red o) (vla-get-green o) (vla-get-blue o))
                    )
                )
            )
            (vlax-release-object o)
            (if (vl-catch-all-error-p r)
                (prompt (strcat "\nError: " (vl-catch-all-error-message r)))
                r
            )
        )
    )
)

 

(LM:ACI->RGB 10) 255 0 0

(LM:ACI->RGB 30) 255 127 0

[eldon]

13 hours ago, Steven P said:

......................

What would cause a PDF that looks good on the screen to print with some of the colours to be feint

 

 

Thanks for any suggestions,

 

 

If you print a PDF scaled To Fit on to an A4, then the lines on an A0 sheet would have very faint colours because the width of the lines is fixed when the pdf is created.

[Steven P]

Cheers Big Al, I think they played with DPIs. 150 to 300 and no difference.

 

Lee Macs colour LISP - I haven't seen that one before, nice as always, but I needed to grab this as well - below just for completion and for anyone else who reads this

 

(defun LM:acapp nil
    (eval (list 'defun 'LM:acapp 'nil (vlax-get-acad-object)))
    (LM:acapp)
)

 

I'll ty that shortly, normally coming away from standard "Red", "Blue" and so on to index colour fixes a lot, might suggest then true colour. I am going to send a PDF to my parter to print, she has older PDF writer just in case a latest update did something weird (the printers are likely to be using the latest software too)

 

 

I see what you mean Eldon, we tend to work in A1, A0 every now and then, but these should be being printed full size 

[BIGAL]

Like Eldon we had multiple ctb depending on what was printing, so we did have a A1 style ctb, at one stage we were making tiffs so the pen sizes were all changed as Eldon mentioned, I think we made thicker as it was pixel based result. You change multiple in the ctb select one then hold shift and highlite more say setting thickness, we used that for 10-250 which we kept as color. 1-8 251-254 were black and grey.

 

Thanks StevenP I thought had added acapp but updated code above.

Edited January 18, 2022 by BIGAL