Printing to PDF is different than what's showing up on Print Preview

[10eighty]

Hey guys,

I was wondering if any of you guys might know why my PDF's are showing up transparency gray while the print preview is showing up the way I would like the PDF to show. I have spent hours trying to figure out what might be causing it. Everything looks great until it gets to PDF. Hopefully the pics explain the situation. It's basically the text boxes where I have transparency set to the fill, and the driveway which I also have set the same way.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

UPDATE.....

Just in case anybody runs into this situation. So after pretty much attempting to eliminate any possible cause, I ended up creating a new layout file and adding each item until the problem occurred. It would seem that when I break my saved plan view layout box to fill in some of the blank areas in the layout page (why not, I thought it looked cool), it seems to be causing the gray in the layout box. Bring it back to a rectangle and whalla, back to how I want it to look. I don't have time to dig in further right now, But I will later and update this post.

 

 

[10eighty]

And now it is printing to PDF the way I was expecting

[DeLayDesign]

Hey Randy.

My company has issues with our Chief printing line weights correctly - sometimes in PDF format and sometime directly to the Plotter.

What we have had to do instead is 'export' the layout as a PDF then print to the plotter.  I don't know the magic that's involved, but this appears to resolve the issue.

Maybe @ChiefArchitectcan give us some insight.  The issue has persisted since X13 for us.

[10eighty]

4 minutes ago, DeLayDesign said:

Hey Randy.

My company has issues with our Chief printing line weights correctly - sometimes in PDF format and sometime directly to the Plotter.

What we have had to do instead is 'export' the layout as a PDF then print to the plotter.  I don't know the magic that's involved, but this appears to resolve the issue.

Maybe @ChiefArchitectcan give us some insight.  The issue has persisted since X13 for us.

 

Hey Adam,

I had posted my original problem on the FB group. When I posted here I had actually removed one of the possible factors, but the problem still remained. @Renerabbitt, the GOAT ;-), commented on the FB group and had mentioned that...

 

"you will run into limitations in the PDF print drivers for things like this regardless of the software being used. PDF format has been long due for a serious overhaul..its very old tech with mild revisions through the years"

 

There are a lot of things going on when we are choosing line weights in plan view and sending saved plan views to layout. Probably some redundancies, and maybe contradictions of what we are trying to have produced. Everything I send out is printed through "Chief Architect Save As PDF" and physically printed at one of our local print shops. 80% is submitted digitally at this point and the governing entity will mark up and return the PDF's for print. I usually go through my digital pdf's thoroughly to check that I didn't have the electrical layer set to 18 or something like that. I try and make sure everything is crisp before I send the digital pdf in for review.

 

If the Digital PDF is clean, usually after it takes it course the prints end up clean. Which brings up something I find very strange... I used to always set my DPI at like 600 thinking it was making a "crisper" PDF. I've had a couple massive plans that would be gargantuan size that I was having a hard time sending digitally due to the 20+mb file size. I digitally print everything at 144 DPI now and my file sizes are small and I can't seem to notice the lack in quality. I bring this up because if I had a large format printer, I think I would send everything out of chief to digital PDF, and then sent the digital PDF to the plotter. It would help isolate the line weight discrepancies. But it sounds like you have been doing that and it still is behaving strangely. 

 

And my situation seemed to be entirely based on adding a break to my layout box. Once I "simplified the polygon" all the weird transparency issues went away. Hopefully this post will save somebody hours of keyboard head banging.

 

Cheers,