When printing a vector drawing from Layout, I have a major issue - wherever there is a fill box, it becomes rasterised AND it rasterises anything within or touching its bounding box - text, lines, other fill. It doesn’t happen on screen and it doesn’t happen if I export a pdf and view that. If I print that pdf, the same rasterisation happens. As a rule I stick to high quality settings throughout. I’m printing to two laser printers, both with Adobe Postscript, one b&w, one colour, it happens with both.
As a workaround, I have discovered if I open the pdf in Adobe Reader and print from that, it doesn’t happen, but that’s adding more stages to what should be a simple process. I’ve had a similar issue in Swift Publisher, unresolved. All suggestions welcome as this is very frustrating!
SketchUp Pro 2016, 2016 27" iMac El Capitan, AMD Radeon R9 M395
Do I understand right: When you export a PDF from LayOut and view it in Adobe Viewer everything looks as it should?
What do you mean by rasterized? Irregular blocky black outlines? That is a bug that seems to haunt Mac users with certain AMD graphics cards. The developers are looking for a fix, but it might be a Radeon driver problem (as your seeing the same in another application suggests). This is discussed at length in Black areas showing up in 2017 Layout viewport - #12 by Anssi.
Yes, but a Layout pdf viewed in Apple Preview or a browser looks fine as well. It will only print correctly from Adobe Reader, not directly from Layout or pasted into other dtp programs.
By rasterisation, I mean things become very slightly blurred - I don’t have the black areas issue (which is why I’m holding back on 2017 for now). I tried a test file in Layout 2017 however and it has the same issue.
I have the same issue with my Mac Mini with an NVIDIA GeForce 320M card as well. These are A3 architectural drawings. There is a noticeable difference in line weight and colour where the issue occurs.
It seems to me that Apple’s print engine is somehow responsible but I’m not quite sure how that works - does it convert a print command to a pdf to send to the printer? If so presumably Adobe Reader overrides that, hence the difference. But surely someone else has this issue?!
You might be onto something with the 72dpi - that may well be how it is printing to produce the areas of lower quality - to do that surely it must be converting the vector parts to raster, as vector is scaleable? I have a basic grasp of pre-press but pdf’s can be a black art. For the colour laser, I can switch to a generic driver - I’ll try that and see if there is a difference.
When I print directly from Layout, what happens when I click on ‘Print’? Does Layout generate a pdf to print from? If so, presumably it uses part of Preview to do so, which then creates the issue. That Apple pdf must have some further processing if printed from Adobe Reader to overcome the issue. Just thinking aloud here … Is this an issue on the Windows version?
Interesting, which prompted me to search around - eventually found this and ‘Miller’s’ comments make for interesting reading.
I did try copying and editing the pdf-x filter to 300dpi, but it didn’t work - it did however give me a pdf where I could see the issue before printing, as attached. The blur is from the edge of a bounding box of irregular shaped fill further up the drawing.
I haven’t tested it, but I suggested on another thread that adding a ‘higher version’ item to your LO template should produce a higher version number and that may ‘trick’ your print driver into printing correctly…
I don’t have a use, so didn’t pursue it further myself…
if you check the 1.6 PDF specs there’s probably something easy to incorporate…
The 1.6 PDF Specification is 1200+ pages long! I looked at the ‘what’s new’ section, but most of it made no sense to me and nothing jumped out as a specific item I could incorporate. Any suggestions please?