Revit 2016 - wrong printing lines(vectors)

[Anonymous]

Hello, I am having trouble printing a floor plan into PFD. In the Revit, the view seems to be correct. There are no problems with exporting view to .DWG.

But PDF (or any other printer) somehow overrides the door or wall lines with floor lines. It seems to be floors but when I override them globaly it does not change in the doors. It I override them in the view, depending on what color I put, it is eather covering walls (if it is white lines) or doors (when is it set black). If I hide the floors, theese parts (doors and walls) appears correctly in pfd, but I can't do that because it messes up the rest of the floor plan.

I attached printscreens:

It should be the same as the first picture - the view in Revit.

But when I print it it ends up always like the other two pictures.

Does anyone know what it could be?

Thank you for you answer

Regina

[Anonymous]

Hi Regina, as we spoke over the phone this appears to be standard Revit behaviour when printing using vector processing. For some reason when object edges overlap Revit gives higher priority to floors over doors or walls no matter whether the are overriden or not. Therefore in your case the white floor edge is covering the middle part of the thicker wall edge so it looks like two thin black lines.

I haven't found anyting that affects drawing order of element edges and why exactly it is floor edges that covers other objects. Tried to mess with line thicknesses, colors in Object Styles and overriding for particular views or even elements but nothing appeared to have effect on the drawing order. It was always floors that dominated.

Can someone from Autodesk bring more light into this?

I consider this a bug because the result is not really WYSIWYG which should be Revit`s drawing philosophy. What mechanism tells the printer to draw floor edges "on top of" others and why can't they be drawn in a logical order (meaning elements closer to the cut plane will cover others)??? A possible fix for this in future releases?

For Regina's issue we suggested not using white color for floor projection lines but override particular edges with the Modify>Linework tool to invisible lines. This is however quite a painful solution because it requires a lot of extra work. Anyone can suggest a less time consuming solution?

[chrisplyler]

A less time consuming solution?

Hmmmmm.....

I don't think floor lines are overriding actual door geometry that is above the floor level. I think you could edit the door families to either include a threshold that sits very slightly above floor level, or a symbolic line that simulates the line you want.

[Anonymous]

This is an issue of printed drawings only, in the Revit canvas everything looks fine until you we print it with vector processing. Raster processing looks fine as well. Floor edge really appears as covering all the lines of walls or doors above it. This has nothing to do with actual geometry of the objects it is a pure printing problem.

The door families already contain symbolic lines (those dashed ones) but when printing they are covered with the white floor edge.

[ToanDN]

If you don't want to see the floor line at the door then Join Geometry the floors on both sides of the door.

[Anonymous]

That would only work if the joined floors had the same finish material which they don't. I know that the material change in the floor finish should be expressed by a continuous line but there was a requirement on these drawings that they shouldn't contain such lines which Regina was hoping to achieve by overriding the floor edges with white color.

[Anonymous]

For a better uderstanding I am sending a picture of how a printed plan looks like. Regardless of the banality of this particular issue I believe the way Revit prints vector lines is wrong in general. Shouldn't it respect the physical order (proximity) of the model elements?

[ToanDN]

I understand this problem. Revit always prints non black lines over black lines.

Meanwhile, not showing the separation line between two floors with different materials makes no logical sense. Might as well turn off the floors altogether.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for clarifying the order of printed lines in vector, but anyway it does not show them in actual order in the view and the raster print don't show them neither. It looks like the lines have this order only in the vector print. This seem to me very confusing.

Btw, there may be reason for hiding this lines temporarily while keeping the floors. I will explain. Sometimes the printing of unfinished (resp. inaccurate/rough borders of floors) plan is needed to be shown to investor, logically during the designing process. And showing the floors with not exact borders is absolutely confusing because it shows lines where they should not be.

So the solution would be to hide these border lines and show the rest of the floors. I have to remind we also need the floors for showing the ground elevation, so we can not hide them. Some models and floors can be locally multilevel in one elevation which would mean we would need to create a plan regions with different view ranges through whole plan just to cover empty spaces. So just make them transparent is not good option neither. This seems to me much more work compare to just hiding the border lines for a while.

I hope I made it clear. Designers sometimes need Revit to not telling everything. 🙂

Also I thank to Daniel for finding another solution for my problem.

[Anonymous]

I agree this requirement has no logical sence but regardless of this particular issue, wouldn't it be nice if Revit really printed things exactly the way we see them in canvas?

 Why do vector and raster processed printings need to look different? This issue with hiding floor edges may be a unique problem of a particular user unimportant to others but I can imagine other situations where this behavoiur may cause troubles.

[chrisplyler]

Ahhhh... so this is the same problem as Revit always seeming to layer halftoned lines OVER black lines when that isn't what I want? Never have figured out a solution to that.

[ToanDN]

If you have Bluebeam you can play with Line Merge settings.  Attached are the two PDFs with Line Merge On and Off.  'On' mode seems to get what you want.  Noted that I only tested with this one particular problem.  It may have unwanted visual effects in other areas.

[Anonymous]

Thank you, this seems to be a way. However, I still think we shouldn't need a 3rd party software to achieve proper printings. Also, this will work for PDFs but not for printing on paper, right? Since I haven't heard of Bluebeam before, I checked its website and found the information rather confising because there seem to be several products. Could you please specify which particular one it is you are using? Thanks again.

[ToanDN]

I use Bluebeam Revu x64.

[ToanDN]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Also, this will work for PDFs but not for printing on paper, right?

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You are right.  I myself have moved away from plot directly to paper for awhile.  Even when I need hard copies I plot from PDF.  But this isn't an excuse for the poor handling of WYSIWYG by Revit, merely a workaround.

[giovannitorre7HB7J]

its been 8 years but we still have the same issue! did anybody find a real solution for this problem?