Dot hatch not plotting

[Anonymous]

I have a drawing with a transparent hatch and dot hatch.  For the transparent hatch to plot in it's faded state, the 'Plot transparency' needs to checked in Plot options.  However i noticed that checking this box causes the dot hatch to not plot at all.  The dot hatch plots fine when the box is unchecked.  Is there a way to plot both the faded transparent hatch and dot hatch together?  Using 2016 version.

[nrz13]

It works for me as expected in 2016.  Can you remove everything from your drawing except the hatches and whatever they're meant to overlay and upload it here for us to look at?

[Anonymous]

Thanks for testing it out.  I did some prints using your files and had the same issue, so i guess the problem is not within my drawing itself.  I did find a workaround which achieves what i needed, which is to create a PDF, then print the PDF.  Would be nice to know if there is proper solution for printing straight from AutoCAD.

[nrz13]

How are you creating the PDF?  Through the built-in AutoCAD 2016 PDF creator, DWG to PDF, or printing to a 3rd party PDF creator?  If you're printing it to a 3rd party driver and that works, and you're using the same options as on your plotter, then it's probably the plotter and not AutoCAD.

It could be a printer driver conflict with your version of AutoCAD and Windows.  I've seen people with HP plotters having trouble using certain versions of AutoCAD on certain versions of Windows (can't remember which ones).  I'd look to see if there is an updated driver available for your plotter.

Otherwise, there's also a Printing and Plotting forum that may be more helpful.

[llorden4]

Is the transparancy set to 0% or some greater value?  It's been a while since I went through this issue, but I seem to recall that with the PDF utility you had to be "all in" on the transparancy to get it to function as desired.

Another trick I remember having to undesirably perform in order to get the dots to show up better, was to edit the line type of the hatch.  I believe the line lengths are set to zero and I found that changing them to a non-zero value helped greatly, something like 0.002 just to give the printing device a value other than zero for a plot length.

Good luck!

[scot-65]

Perhaps you were thinking of the old-style pen plotter (where the sheet scrolls back and fourth and the pen travel left and right)?
We had this issue once upon a time with the dashdot linetype creating angled ticks where it should have been just a dot...
🙂

[llorden4]

That was a long trip back with the pen plotter, but no, I wasn't thinking that far back.