Text in drawings shows as very light grey when plotted to PDF; not when printed or previewed.

[rchacinRUGAK]

Hello, community, 

I have what I hope is a very simple problem to solve, and I'd appreciate your feedback. 

The problem:

I have a set of drawings that, when plotted to PDF, have certain items come in very light grey color, making it extremely difficult to read. The preview shows them in a dark color/black. When printed to actual paper, they're perfectly fine to read. So I'm not sure what's going on.

For some specificity, I am focusing on a few tables I had to create, where the Data text is just too faint to read. Other items throughout the drawing also come out as light grey (there are dozens of pages), usually descriptions for components.

The background: 

This is a set of EPLAN drawings that were exported to AutoCAD. I've been applying redlines by using existing components, and a few additions here and there, such as the tables mentioned above. Most pages in the project are untouched, yet they do display some of these light grey text, so I am assuming it's part of the overall setting and not just something I did. 

Plot settings:

• DWG To PDF.pc3
• ISO expand A4
• Extents
• Center the plot
• Fit to paper
• monochrome.ctb
• Shade, As displayed
• Quality, Normal.
• Plot object lineweights
• Plot with plot styles
• Landscape

Fixes attempted: 

• I have tried different PDF plotters, and they all turn out the same. The only one that seemed to make a different was Microsoft Print to PDF, but the page distribution is off.
• I have tried different plot style tables, including monochrome.ctb, acad.ctd, etc., to no avail. I have gone as far as to create a new one, and assign Index Color 7 to all of the available plot styles, to no avail. 
• I have unselected the Plot Options mentioned above, with no success. 
• I have gone into the Table Style editor and changedthe color of the Data text to multiple things, including ByLayer, and Index Color 7, to no avail. 
• In essence, I have been making attempts checking and unchecking every item on the Plot screen that I can think of and it doesn't work, as well as manually changing every color of every item I can think of, and it doesn't make a different.

Likely a case of "you don't know what you don't know". But, do you have any suggestions? 

[OP21]

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

Here's a posted thread for similar issues... 

Solved: Re: PDF printing and very faint lines - Autodesk Community - AutoCAD Electrical

[rchacinRUGAK]

Hi, OP21. Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately, it did not work.

[rhesusminus]

What fonts are you using for your text styled in those drawings? 

Is it just texts that are "grey"?

[rchacinRUGAK]

So far, it's only the text. Any shapes or objects that would have come out too thin or to faint, I was able to fix by adjusting the right layer - but not this. 

See zoomed in screen capture below for reference:

In this particular table/instance, for the Data I am using a Test Style out of the drawing called "Caddy_Vectorfont1P", which appears to be what's in use across the whole project. I selected it specifically so it would match the rest of the pages. For the Header and Title I am using "Caddy_Arial", under the same reasoning. 

[rhesusminus]

Seems like these are See Electrical drawings exported to dwg.

But, what fonts are the text styles using? Use the STYLE command to open the text style dialog and have a look.

[rchacinRUGAK]

It seem to be "Regular". See screenshot below:

[Thomas.CoxTFXY8]

the easiest way to fix this is to get away from using shx type fonts and use TTF fonts

[rchacinRUGAK]

I am kind of tied to it since it's what's used all over the project. Do you have any suggestions to make it work as it? Otherwise, could all fonts be switched globally in a swift motion? I have some 80 distinct pages and going one by one is not possible.

[OP21]

You might want to explore writing a script file similar to this,  save it and call it from the Project Wide Utilities feature. (it has other benefits and functions to apply to all dwgs..)

I've done this to target specific font styles within dwgs.

-STYLE
Standard
"Century Gothic"
0
1
0
N
N

You can test the script on 1 dwg and if successful run a batch "for each dwg" across all dwgs in your project doing a project wide "utilities update"

First save your project files into a test folder or back them up in case something goes wrong.. 🙂

[pendean]

---

@rchacinRUGAK wrote:
I am kind of tied to it since it's what's used all over the project....

---

SHX fonts are weight-less single lines, that's why you see what you see: since you say it prints was better than in looks on the PDF, it might just be your PDF Viewer that is the problem.

Use a different PDF viewer brand (BTW all modern browsers are PDF viewers too these days if you don't have an alternate), see if that makes a difference in your display-only issue.

[rchacinRUGAK · Accepted solution]

I think I may have found a solution: 

I found an article from AutoCAD that led me down this path:

1. Here, it is suggested that when publishing to PDF, the system must replace some .shx fonts with .ttf in order to make the PDF file searchable. The file with the replacement instructions is called acade.fmp, and the article suggest a quick way to go about this is to edit it and define which font to use as a replacement.
   1. I tried doing this, but it wouldn't work. 
2. Eventually I found an answer from @rhesusminus here where he suggested the acad.fmp file should be set up instead. In my case, it already was, so I couldn't quite fix the problem then. I tried editing that file, too, but it wouldn't work either.
   1. Reading further down the thread he stated "The acade.fmp should only be used by the AEPUBLISH command when font substitution is turned on". I realized then that I was using the PLOT command, and that perhaps that could explain why my initial attempts failed.
   2. I experimented with AEPUBLISH and indeed, the changes made to the acade.fmp file took on, so long the box  []Substitute TrueType fonts for SHX fonts was checked when prompted with the Publish Setup window. 
3. At this point I tried multiple variations of the isocp.shx font, as many as I could come up with. This didn't quite work as those variations kept coming out grey and faint. 
   1. In light on this, I set out to find a font close enough to isocp.shx, which proved trickier than you'd imagine. Ultimately, I came across a suggestion to use isocpeur.ttf, which appears to be close enough to the original font to pass. 

In theory you could use the same method to substitute it with Arial, or any other more commonly used font.

This isn't a complete fix in the sense that you'd be ultimately changing things, thus voiding the whole point of keeping the drawing consistent/as close to original as possible. It also left me with the question of when/how/why use the PLOT command vs. AEPUBLISH (if any of you have any feedback on that, I'd appreciate it). But it appears to offer a way to keep moving a long. 

If there's anything here that could be/should be refined, I'd appreciate the feedback as well for future reference. 

[arshdeepsingh404]

Hi @rchacinRUGAK 

I am sure you probably have tried this already but can you confirm if fixing the colour to white still plots it in light grey?

Sometimes I find that setting everything to Thickness property to By Layer option, and the enabling Plot Object lineweights options helps with the thickness and colour problem of CAD imported from other software.

If you can attached the problematic drawing here, I can run some tests on it to see if we can find some other solution.

[rchacinRUGAK]

Hi, Arshdeep. I tried at some point adjusting the color to Index Color 7, but the PDF would still come out as light grey. If you look at my latest reply (to my myself), I described what I believe the issue is, and a fair workaround. But long story short, the project wasn't really plotting to the true font isocp.shx, rather it was using a different, predetermined isocp__.ttx to output that. The latter being apparently thinner than its .shx counterpart, thus giving this appearance of a grey, washed out font. 

I don't recall if I tried your suggestion about thickness specifically, but I do know I tried changing the color source of the actual text from ByBlock, to ByLayer, to a specific color, then to Color Index 7, all the way around. 

Correction: I just doublechecked, and I did try enabling Plot Object Lineweights at some point, with no success.

Thanks for the help. 

[natalie-lareau]

This has happened to me when printing old prints done by others & the 2 solutions that worked for me are:

1) Having monochrome.ctb as my plot style table

2) Previous engineers seemed to ALWAYS have their lineweight at 0.00 causing the text to be very faint when printed/PDF. Now I make it a point that if I'm in an old print I always change the lineweight to either ByLayer or ByBlock. Once printed or PDF is created the text or object is legible.