PDF plotting issue

[deltacoolguy]

I have a fairly complex project.  Demo sheets, plan & profile sheets, cross-sections, and so on.  I have the sheet set manager set up into subsets.  We plot to PDF for this project, then print from the PDFs.  We use DWG to PDF.pc3 in our plot set-up.

All the subsets and individual sheets plot fine, as in speed and quality.  The demo sheets take forever to plot.  The quality is fine, but an individual sheet takes 30+ minutes, and there are six sheets in the subset.  The rest of the set, over 80 sheets, can be done in 10 minutes.  The status box says "flattening" at 5% and seems to stick there, though eventually breaking loose, just a long time later.

There is a lot of hatching, though not an outrageous amount.  There is another subset that has aerial photos for backgrounds and those plot just fine.

Has anyone come across this?  Any suggestions?

[wfberry]

I notice that you only have 8 GB of memory.  Perhaps you are running out of memory and moving over to the hard drive, this will be quite slow.

Bill

[deltacoolguy]

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@wfberry wrote:

I notice that you only have 8 GB of memory.  Perhaps you are running out of memory and moving over to the hard drive, this will be quite slow.

Bill

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Oops, sorry.  That is my home computer and is left over from when I was self-employed.  The computer I am working on now has 12MB RAM.

I should mention, though, it's not just me.  The same thing happens whenever anybody in the office tries to print the same file.

[rkmcswain]

I guess as a test, you could make a copy of the file, delete all the hatching, save it, replace your "good" file, and see if the print speed goes to normal.

IOW, take the hatch out of the equation if you think that may be the problem and test it.

[gary.lovegrove]

Go to properties for the plotter/printer, Custom Properties, uncheck "Include Layer Information". You could set the resolution lower too. The "Include Layer Information" setting is in multiple places (two more?) when publishing, so it is harder to turn off.

Gary

[rl_jackson]

Its the hatch pattern - I hat hatching stuff. To many times I have seen things blow up in my face (Crashhhhhh!!!)

[gary.lovegrove]

Make sure the point of origin for your hatch pattern is near the hatch. In the hatch dialog box, in the lower left corner pick "Specified origin" then pick a point near the hatch pattern.

Gary Lovegrove
Engineering Technician II
City of Chico/Engineering/Capital Projects
(530) 879-6934 / (530) 895-4899 Fax

[KirkNoonan]

If you plot those sheets individually - not using the publish command, it will fix the problem. I don't know why, but it the pdf files will plot normally.

[deltacoolguy]

We're back on this issue.

Apparently transparency is the issue.  I've done some experimentation, and have found the following...

- Remove (freeze) ALL the hatch and it plots great.  The pdf also goes from 8.5MB to 0.5MB.

- Separate the hatch to a separate file, remove all transparancy, xref into the demo file, and works fine.  I get a 4MB pdf, but it works.

- Applt 50% transpoarency to the hatch in the new file, try again, and it's still 4MB now, and is still slow but not as slow as it was.  Too slow to be workable, though.

I also tried making the xref'd layer 50% transparent, but that didn't help.  Is there a way to have a hatch/layer transparent without being transparent?

[rl_jackson]

When you say transparent do you mean gray scale - if so, then just set a pen in you plot table to do that, I have all the colors from 250-255 as gray scale with different percentages of gray to acheive this.

[johngordon6189]

you could also try plotting the pdf as an image from the advanced plot settings. John

[deltacoolguy · Accepted solution]

I like the screening idea, but our company *.ctb file has literally zero options for screening.  (I disagree with this "simplicity", but it's not my company.)  I tried it anyway, with mixed results.  Anyway, if I got rid of all the transparency it prints fine.

If I have transparency in any form, even *.ctb screening, it plots faster than it did, but still at about 15 minutes per sheet.  Was taking upwards of 30 minutes.  PDF file size for these six sheets only did drop from 8.5mb to 4mb.

We have decided that we will forgo the transparency, at least for now.  Thank you all for your help.

Oh, and I should note that the PDFs are required as submittal format by the city (our client), so we are wedded to the PDF as a final product, and their ability to print simply dictates.

[charles.neely]

Even though you marked a solution I'll offer a work around no one mentioned. Print a hard copy and scan to pdf. It's never as elegant but it will save you time/money compared to the current situation. Good luck~