Weird anomalies appearing when Layout exports to PDF

After the recent update I’m getting annoying extra lines showing up on the exported PDF. They don’t show in Layout or Sketchup but only in the PDF. Looking for a way to stop this hapening?

It would be interesting to see if this is hardware related. Can you share a LayOut file that exhibits this behavior so that we can try it and see if we get the same results?

It could be hardware related, but it never used to happen until the latest update.
File attached.

Demo.layout (230.8 KB)

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This is what I see in LayOut.

And in the PDF
Screenshot%20-%208_13_2019%20%2C%209_46_04%20PM

So it does appear to be the same result.

Odd way to build your models which may have something to do with it.

Using the Last saved SketchUp view is not a good way to work in LayOut.

Hey thanks for taking a look.
Odd way to build. Sure.
Using Last saved view is not good. First I’ve heard of that, but sure.
But again, It didn’t used to do this until the most recent update.
Appreciate your quick responses.
Thanks.

Proper method is to create scenes in SketchUp and use those for the viewports. Using Last saved SketchUp View for viewports creates problems when you go back to the model to make revisions and then don’t save with exactly the same camera position.

Not sure why the anomaly in your models. I haven’t seen this sort of thing in any of mine.

Ah, gotcha. I do use scenes a lot of the time, but as long as you use [Modified] Last sketchup view [That is; if you modify the camera from within Layout] then making revisions and updating will work fine without changing the set camera position.
Thanks again.

Modified scenes, even Last saved… is a recipe for problems, too. It sounds like you don’t really care so I’ll leave.

No, that’s helpful to know. I wasn’t aware that modified scenes could cause problems. I thought they were a useful feature for tweaking camera positions. But I’ll try using scenes and see if that eliminates these stray lines. Sorry for sounding rude, I guess I was just frustrated at the problem. Not at you. Thanks for the help. really.

Sim:
Any progress on a solution to this issue? I am experiencing the same issue. I did notice one my out of place lines display in layout while working yesterday, updating the model reference corrected the issue, but it is now showing up in my pdf exports today.

Thanks

I am also having this issue. I have to edit the pdf to get rid of these artifacts and its not a very clean process.

Hi all, we have some known issues relating to the way our hidden line renderer can display some extra lines or fills in the case of section cuts. Over the past few releases we have made an attempt to capture all of them but just as with any fix we cannot get all cases. In some cases we have not been able to fix adjusting the Viewport window (or even adding a clipping mask to it) can sometimes make the extra lines go away.

In your case Sim, I am able to get the anomalies to go away by just doing the following.

  1. Select the SketchUp model view
  2. From the SketchUp Model inspector check on Preserve Scale on Resize

I have verified this fixes this for both Windows and Mac - exporting to PDF looks good as well.

@awburgess and @bfunkhouser0 try the above and see if that helps in your case, if not drag an edge of the viewport in or out and see if that helps.
Please feel free to post or PM me your file as well.

Trent

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Hey Trent,

Thanks for taking the time to respond, first day on SU community but long-time SU user nice to see involvement from the SU team. I tried the recommended fixes but am still getting the line though my exported or printed (to pdf) document. I’ve applied whiteout via a pdf editor so I could send these to my client, I need to do some revisions in LO so I will need to whiteout the next pdf, which its a big deal but not ideal, so far there’s been two or three jobs like this. Let me know if you have any other suggestions. I’ve had success in the past by making a copy of the SU model in a new file and using that (if I recall properly).

Anderson.layout (1.3 MB) Anderson.skp (818.0 KB)

Is it possible this is partially caused by the PDF application? I had some weird issues with Phantom PDF until they made an update.

I actually made a small adjustment to all of my posts (reduced the height of the post base by 1/16th) and this eliminated the issue.

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@bfunkhouser0 That is interesting for sure… @RLGL you may be onto something as I do not see the issue when I export the same file on Mac. Usually when it is a rendering issue within LayOut or SketchUp then it will be consistent between platforms.

Trent

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Hey thanks Trent. I’ll try your advise next time this happens. Cheers.

To add to the other suggestions from Trent, we just had a case where it was still showing the diagonal line artifacts. The fix for our new case (and it does fix Sim’s case too) is to select the model in LayOut, change it from what it is now to something else, and back again (for example, Vector to Hybrid or Raster, and back to Vector in Sim’s case). Then either let the auto render happen, or manually click the render button.

That seems to fix things.

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Continuing the discussion from Weird anomalies appearing when Layout exports to PDF:

Hi,

I have the same problem exporting to .pdf, but it also occurs in LayOut print preview.
are you having the same result? = problem within LayOut?

Regards
Tobbe

Thank you for the tip Colin, unfortunately this doesn’t work for me. Leaving it in raster fixes the issue but is not an ideal solution in most cases.

Tobbe, yes this issue is present in the print preview for me as well. It also appears to show up when printing directly from layout. I don’t have a large format printer to test direct to media but tried printing to pdf and to Microsoft xps and both still had the issue present.