Revit 2010 Printing - Eliminate blank areas

[Anonymous]

Good afternoon, This is my first post here in this forum, so I hope I am doing everything right, although I am not sure if the following is an issue related to Revit or to the HP plotter drivers 😉 As the title says, we are currently still using Revit 2010 and we are having the problem that when printing e.g. a floor plan to a HP T1300 in a certain scale on a page that is bigger than the actual drawing size, the plotter spits out a whole bedsheet of paper. I know that in the HP settings one can check the "autorotate" and "eliminate blank areas" options and both are checked, so theoretically although I am printing on a bigger sheet, the plotter should take care of optimizing the printing area. But it does not, unless I am not seeing another option or tick that I have to check. By chance, anybody has run into this kind of problem? And knows how to solve it? Thanks in advance, Sebastian

[LisaDrago]

Hello @Anonymous and Welcome to the Discussion!!

So I am not sure if it is Revit or your HP... But when it does print - is it printing the Drawing?

You mentioned that the drawing is bigger then the sheet... so the drawing is larger then the titleblock?

Does it do this for only one file? or for all?

LD

[Alaaeldin_Alsahli]

To know if it is revit or not, try to print it in other printing devices if not with a PDF. and if you have the same results then it is Revit. if not make sure that you have the same printer driver than the one is installed on the printer server. Try to delete completley the printer and its driver and then reinstall it 

[Anonymous]

Hello Lisa, Thanks for your reply. Yes, in fact it is printing the drawing. Maybe I expressed myself wrong, but it is the other way round: The sheet is bigger than the drawing. And it generally happens when the drawing is printed without a titleblock. This is when for any reason the auto-cut and auto-rotate functions that are activated in Revit and in the driver do not seem to work properly. Regards, Sebastian

[Anonymous]

Hello Alaaeldin, thanks for your reply. The autorotate and "eliminate blank areas" functions are only available on HP Plotters. So printing on any other device than a HP plotter will not be comparable. Printing on the other plotters we have results in the same problem. But they are the same model and therefore use the same driver, so this seems kind of obvious. Anyway, I followed your recommendation and deleted the devices and drivers and reinstalled them. Still the same problem. For your reference: the driver is HP Designjet T1300 Driver 64-bit (v61.141.2518.700), installed on Windows 7, 64-bits. I appreciate your help. Regards, Sebastian

[Alaaeldin_Alsahli]

I am not familiar with HP so try the following

1. Check other setting may be there is something you need to check or uncheck for example (Print on) sometime paper sized are forced so there som setting for it.

2. if you go to Margins/Layout setting and change some setting, do it helps

Try it on a small paper to not waste any size

3. If you just activate "eliminate blank areas" option and instead of auto rotate create a custom paper 

4. How about the automatic cutter, if you enable or disable it does it helps

5. Try The same scenario with autocad or a pdf file and see if you could print it

6. If you draw a light color rectangular around that sheet and try to print, does it optimize it

7. Can you try it Revit 2014 or 15

8. I am not sure about this one but it is worth the try

[Anonymous]

1. Check other setting may be there is something you need to check or uncheck for example (Print on) sometime paper sized are forced so there som setting for it.

Checked it, but not the case.

2. if you go to Margins/Layout setting and change some setting, do it helps

Try it on a small paper to not waste any size

Yepp - this is what we are currently doing. But it's kind of tiresome to figure out what paper size matches the piece of drawing you would like to print for revision purposes.

3. If you just activate "eliminate blank areas" option and instead of auto rotate create a custom paper 

4. How about the automatic cutter, if you enable or disable it does it helps

No difference

5. Try The same scenario with autocad or a pdf file and see if you could print it

AutoCAD / pdf works fine

6. If you draw a light color rectangular around that sheet and try to print, does it optimize it

No.

7. Can you try it Revit 2014 or 15

My last hope 😉

8. I am not sure about this one but it is worth the try

Nothing.

---

 I will keep on trying with another version of Revit, but I am done for today.

We probably killed some trees with all the trial and error, but I will let you know if we find a fix.

Thanks for your help.

Regards,

Sebastian

[Alaaeldin_Alsahli]

It will be helpful if you could test it with 2014 or 2015 and keep us posted

[Anonymous]

Ok - just tried it with 2014 and there everything worked well, without any problems.

So it seems that is is a problem with 2012.

Regards,

Sebastian

[Alaaeldin_Alsahli]

my next question is :-), 

I want to know if it is Revit 2012 in general or just on your computer? can you test it on another computer?

[Anonymous]

It's in general.

We tried it yesterday on several computers here in the office an all are having the same problem.

[Alaaeldin_Alsahli]

my second question is

Does this happen to all project in 2012, if you open new project and create a sheet, does it acts the same

[Anonymous]

Yes, it does. It happens in all the projects we tried and I just drew a wall in a completely new project, printed it and the problem is exactly the same.

[Alaaeldin_Alsahli]

does happen to 2010 only or even 2012

[Alaaeldin_Alsahli]

I don’t know a lot how printer driver communicate, logically the issue could be caused by .net framework 4.5

When you install Revit 2013 SP3 or 2014, it will upgrade .netframework 4.0 to 4.5

 Your older Revit version is now communicate with .net framework 4.5 which used to be 4.0 which is not 100% compatible to communicate. We had some issue in the past with revit 2012 related to the ribbon and ProjectWise when .net 4.0 is upgraded to 4.5

OR The printer driver 61.141.2518.700 may have new language that is only understandable with 4.5.

I am not the expert in that but maybe the option to save paper could use .netframework 4.5 where Revit 2010 can’t understand it.

If it used to work. When that was? Is it since you guys updated the driver or since you guys installed Revit 2013 sp3 or Revit 2014

If you don’t remember then

Try to find a brand new computer and make sure .netframe work 4.5 is not installed and then install only Revit 2010.

If it does not work,  you may need to roll back your printer driver and do the testing

[Anonymous]

You may be right regarding the .net version.

I just installed the Revit 2015 right next to the 2012 on my desktop (I am experiencing the same issue as our draftsmen).

Printing from 2015 works just fine, while printing from the 2012 creates the problem as already known.

At some time, we were affected by the .net issue in combination with the ribbon. However, the patch provided solved the ribbon issue.

As for your last question regarding when the problem occured, unfortunately I am not sure. Normally I am not too closely involved in the daily IT / Revit issues here, but only when out-of-the-ordinary things come up. Like this one 😄

Seems like the problem occurs since some time back. But as approx. 80% of the prints are final versions and that have a titleblock that matches an exact paper size, the problem is not perceived. It only comes up when we print part of a view or a specific floor plan or elevation. And it happened definitively before updating the printer driver, so it theoretically may have happened since the .net update.

If this was the case, I suppose there is not much to do about, right? Unless we consider updating Revit to 2014 or 2015 *lol*

By chance, you do not feel like publishing a patch on this, do you 😉

Regards,

Sebastian

[Alaaeldin_Alsahli · Accepted solution]

I will create defect case to our development team, but it may not be taken in consideration because of the following reasons:

It is not consider Critical, so other defect cases will be priortized than this one

HP driver will be consider as a third party, so they could blame it on HP 😛

the devlopers doesn't have any HP printer to test it with.

I wished that we could Solve the issue on the spot, but as I see it i suggest you to deal with it with alternative solution

[Alaaeldin_Alsahli]

You may need to roll back the printer driver, so the next test is to install Revit 2012 in a brand new computer without any .net framework installed

and test it with the new printer driver

If it works which mean it is a netframe issue

if there is an issue you need to roll back the printer driver till you find the one that used to work 

[Anonymous]

Ok - thanks for all your help.

We are just architects and no IT specialist , so we will go with the alternative solutions, until we decide to update to Revit 2014 or 2015. Which will probably be some time soon.

Regards,

Sebastian