Funky Arrow Lines?

[Nicinus]

I assume this is a bug but wanted to check if anyone knows a way around it or if I'm doing something wrong.

 

Have a look at the attached picture of a detail dummy, all horisontal lines on the arrows seems to vary in thickness? The picture is a screen shot from a a pdf at 100%, this is the way it prints. (Don't worry about the line work on the actual detail, I just use this one as a template).

 

 

[Doug_Park]

What target DPI did you choose on your PDF? A low DPI could cause problems that I would imagine would look something like that.

[Nicinus]

I used 1200dpi but have since tested with 2400dpi without any noticeable difference.

 

I must be doing something wrong since no one else seems to have this issue. I will test more.

[Nicinus]

Adobe Acrobat but I don't remember seeing this before.

[DRAWZILLA]

I also use Adobe Acrobat and Don't see that. 400 dpi is good for most 24 x 36 printing unless you want a very large print.

[Nicinus]

There is definitely a difference between the built-in 'Save as pdf' and using Adobe pdf as the printer driver, quite dramatic in fact.

 

I printed them out, both using 1200dpi, and compared side by side the built-in 'Save as pdf' is by far the preferable option. Lines are in general much cleaner and more distinct. Patterns with fine lines look much better. For some reason the difference when it comes to cad-blocks is the most notable, staying clean at 800% whereas the Adobe pdf becomes very jagged and often introduced artifacts, like it doesn't have access to the same data. (Which it may not.)

 

Why it is like this is another question. In some cases, especially with some parallel lines in walls, it looked a bit better with Adobe pdf. Almost as if it was using more antialiasing than the built-in driver and therefore cleaned up some graphics issues. In the end it doesn't matter as the built-in was superior in almost all aspects.

[DRAWZILLA]

For me the built in "PDF" creates a much larger file size, than using Adobe. So I use adobe for that reason. I don't see any problems like that, using Adobe

[Nicinus]

The differences that I've seen are not obvious until compared, but I now find them significant. I made a test print to pdf both on screen and paper in order to compare, and in many cases I felt the difference was even more noticable on paper.

 

Print size on this, admittedly not complete set, was 6.8MB for the Adobe pdf compared to 8.1MB for the built-in, so at least in my case it won't matter. These sizes pass most email systems today and if not I can recommend wetransfer (free up to 2GB).

 

I made some examples of differences between Adobe and the built-in, the built-in is always the example on the right. Zooming varies.

 

This first one shows a break in the wall that isn't even noticable in the Adobe pdf. The built-in shows it the way it looks zoomed in on plan (although hard to see even in plan).

 

Example of graphics inside a CAD block (which seems to get some form of special treatment in Chief, doesn't behave the same as regular cad/vector graphics in Chíef)

 

Another cad block example.

 

Plain library symbol of a wine rack.

 

Some drawn lines in layout that became double somehow in the Adobe pdf.

 

This elevation doesn't differ that much looking on screen, but on print the linework from the built-in pdf was much cleaner and the contrast higher.

 

Finallý the example I started with, start lines on arrows shows varying linework on Adobe pdf.

[DRAWZILLA]

Most of my plans are at least 20 pages so I notice a large difference in file size between the two.