topic Re: HELP PLEASE: PDF printing and very faint lines in AutoCAD Electrical Forum

PDF printing and very faint lines

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 20:32:04 GMT

When using publish to create a dwg to pdf it looks good when viewing on my monitor, but when I print it or our customers print it some of the lines print very faint. I only use the standard colors 1 - 9. The worst colors when printing are green and cyan. I have tried using the different settings and nothing is working. HELP PLEASE. I have attached the symbols pdf the publish created and the other is after printing. Am I missing a setting I should be using?

Re: PDF printing and very faint lines

OP21 — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 20:57:40 GMT

Have you tried turning off AEPDFFONTALT? This sometimes solves the light text issue when plotting to pdf.

Re: PDF printing and very faint lines

testsubject — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 21:45:55 GMT

In the Page Setup of each drawing what is the "Plot Style Table" set to? It should be set to Monochrome. It sounds like it might be set to grayscale.

Re: PDF printing and very faint lines

Anonymous — Thu, 10 Dec 2015 12:42:35 GMT

OP21 Your solution worked, pdf prints look great - Thank you

Re: PDF printing and very faint lines

Anonymous — Thu, 10 Dec 2015 12:46:50 GMT

Thank you for your response, monochrome was selected forgot to mention that in my post.

HELP PLEASE: PDF printing and very faint lines

Anonymous — Mon, 24 Apr 2017 17:02:23 GMT

Hi,

I am not sure what has happened but when I go to save into pdf and print floor plans they are coming out far to faint. Also strangely once saved to pdf when I try to view on my computer a lot of the pdf is not viewable. Generally I go to print in the layout section and then save to pdf there. This has always been fine in the past.

In the layout page the colours appear strong and vibrant

Firstly I have checked ink levels, it is not that.

I think have checked transparency which looks fine

I tried turning AEPDFFONTALT off in the command line - I could not work out how to do this. not sure if this will help anyway but I saw it mentioned somewhere.

I have attached a couple of shots of the save pdfs showing all the missing words and lines.

Any help here would be really appreciated, I am completely stuck with this. Thanks

Re: HELP PLEASE: PDF printing and very faint lines

rhesusminus — Mon, 24 Apr 2017 19:11:33 GMT

The AEPDFFONTALT is a command for AutoCAD Electrical only. Doesn't sound like it's related to your problem.

Is it only the texts that are unreadable in the PDF, or is any other linework missing?
Does it look good in the print preview?

Re: HELP PLEASE: PDF printing and very faint lines

stefan.stamate — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 15:26:55 GMT

Does anybody have a solution for this issue (faint lines when publishing to pdf) when using AutoCAD Electrical 2014? The AEPDFFONTALT variable mentioned as a solution is only available from AE2016...

Thanks for your help!

Re: HELP PLEASE: PDF printing and very faint lines

rhesusminus — Tue, 20 Jun 2017 10:37:47 GMT

Are all lines faint, or just the texts? Are you using truetype fonts? What pen settings are you using? Try monochrome.ctb.

Re: HELP PLEASE: PDF printing and very faint lines

stefan.stamate — Tue, 20 Jun 2017 12:39:41 GMT

From what I have noticed everything (text or lines) which has a different colour in AutoCAD is getting converted to a gray shade when is coming to plotting. I am using monochrome.ctb. Now I was using Foxit pdf reader or PDF Exchange to print and I just a test in this morning with Adobe and it seems like everything is fine. And funny enough the quality on the screen is much better on Foxit or PDF Exchange (the lines are bolder) but the print quality is poor and vice versa for Adobe: the quality on the screen is poor (the lines are faded) but the print quality is good.

Thanks for your help!

Re: HELP PLEASE: PDF printing and very faint lines

rhesusminus — Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:16:54 GMT

Have you tried the out-of-the-box PDF drivers that comes with AutoCAD?

Re: HELP PLEASE: PDF printing and very faint lines

stefan.stamate — Tue, 20 Jun 2017 15:20:23 GMT

No, we have used the Bullzip pdf printer in a page setup which we are importing it at the publishing to pdf time but now that you have mentioned I will give it a try and see if it makes a difference.

Thanks for your help!

Re: PDF printing and very faint lines

peter_mead — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 16:43:37 GMT

I had the same problem using the built in Print to PDF utility. I used High Quality Print option and it produced very feint lines. Changing to Mobile and Web setting cured the problem.