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About Archicad's documenting tools, views, model filtering, layouts, publishing, etc.

PDF's not printing on Layout Sheets

Anonymous
Not applicable
Aloha,
i have placed a pdf 'drawing' onto a layout sheet, it looks fine.
Yet when i go to print nothing prints, even if i go to print as a pdf,
i get a blank page.

thanks in advance for the secret,
dean johnston

pc / windows xp pro v 2002
sp 3
4GB ram
dual intel Xeon 2.66
16 REPLIES 16
Anonymous
Not applicable
/bump

Has anybody found a resolution to this issue with PDFs not printing from layout books? I have found that printing smaller PDFs on the layout books seem to work out fine but anything in the larger size (24x36) either A) does not plot at all B) fails to even send to my plotter.

The only resolution that I have found is saving the layout page as it's own PDF and then printing out that particular page using Adobe Acrobat. This is an extra step that I wish I could do without since I would like to plot directly from the ArchiCAD layout books.

Any new information would be wonderful, thanks!
Thomas Holm
Booster
Version, platform in signature?

Did you do a search? (this was discussed just a couple of days ago)
AC4.1-AC26SWE; MacOS13.5.1; MP5,1+MBP16,1
Anonymous
Not applicable
AC 11, Windows Vista

I did not see anything posted in the last couple days about this topic... at least in this particular index...
Anonymous
Not applicable
I think this was the thread Thomas was refering to -

http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=140382

A search for "Print PDF" brought it up.
Thomas Holm
Booster
General advice:

0 Check that your Archicad is updated to the most recent build.

1 Publish to PDF instead of printing directly, if possible.

2 If you're using a cheap printer without built-in Postscript, Publish to PDF and print it from Adobe reader using the Advanced: Print As Picture option.

3 Do the transformations (rotate, scale, crop, overlay etc) of your PDFs in another program (illustrator, Acrobat Pro, Preview) before placing them into Archicad.

4 If it still doesn't work, use a photo editor (like Photoshop) to make a bitmapped picture (tiff or jpeg) of the PDF, apply your transformations, and place the image (picture tool) in Archicad. Take care to do it at the final output resolution and it will keep its quality.
AC4.1-AC26SWE; MacOS13.5.1; MP5,1+MBP16,1
Anonymous
Not applicable
hp 5500 plotter.
Thomas Holm
Booster
Gary wrote:
hp 5500 plotter.
I don't know if this is an answer to the above issues, or another question?
My guess is the latter. The HP 5500 is a fine inkjet printer, but while being large, it shares the issues with smaller, cheaper ones. Just 128 MB standard memory, and no built-in Postscript. (I don't know if it's possible to add later). Check that you have the latest drivers.

My recommendation is the same:Publish your Archicad output to a PDF, and print that using Adobe Reader's Print As Picture option.
AC4.1-AC26SWE; MacOS13.5.1; MP5,1+MBP16,1