Round Filled Regions Printing Blocky

[a_kralkay]

Why don't circles and curves in filled regions stay smooth and round?

I can draw a filled region in a detail view or title block family and it looks perfect, but then when loaded into the project (or another family) all of the curved/round portions look very blocky. Like you set the VIEWRES in Autocad too low. It even prints to PDF and paper like this. The region is printing as vector graphics, but it's a polygon not a circle.

As a test I made a filled region in a title block family. I copied it and added to a Generic Annotation family then loaded it back into my title block family. The GA version looks all blocky while that same filled region in the title block family looks perfect. Then, when I load that title block family into the project, the same thing happens and now they both shapes look blocky.

This is incredibly frustrating as this is our company logo that we obviously want to look nice and crisp. Using a .jpeg (colors are way off) or .png (prints like it was given a thick lineweight) for the company logo doesn't work either. And creating a .dwg then importing also doesn't work, it screws up the colors and the solid fills. I already had to modify the logo a bit because some lines were "too small on screen" (on that note, its 2023... There are 0 good reasons left for why I can't draw lines however small I want. This is just ridiculous at this point) or it simply didn't like how close a corner got to another line (despite it rendering it perfectly fine in the .dwg that I imported). But now even after all that it still looks terrible when I PDF any drawing because the logo still looks like a low res export. And printing directly from the family editor doesn't help.

I'm at a loss here. It's either a blocky inaccurate filled region with the right colors, or a blurry raster image with the colors all wrong and text too thick. There has to be a better way to add your company logos to the title block, right?

Image for reference. Left is a generic annotation family inserted into the Title block family. Right is the same filled region in the title block family. Notice how the right its all smooth and round. How do I get it to print like that?

 

[whp.m.owens]

Not sure it is possible...because you know...it's Revit.

Anyways. I have another issue with filled regions in drafting views.

This is not a localized problem, I have tested it on two machines:

Displays just fine in legend views at the same scale / detail level. Looks like a glitch to me.

[SteveKStafford]

Do you have a DWG file linked in the project file? If a DWG has extents that Revit regards as too large then the jagged lines in many elements is a symptom of that. If you turn off the display of all CAD links/imports in a view and the jagged lines go away then one of the DWG files that have been loaded into the project is to the cause.

[a_kralkay]

No DWG's linked at all, not even in the main project. This is just a title block family that consists of lines, labels, and this filled region for the logo.

[syman2000]

Can you upload the sample file so we can test printing from our end?

[a_kralkay]

Here it is. You can see I'm using a generic annotation for the logo. If you open that family you can copy and paste the filled region into the main title block family to compare.

[syman2000]

Looks like the culprit is the generic annotation. I assume that generic annotation go with scale of the drawing. Since there is no set scale in titleblock, it create this weird jagged fill. If I use fill region to replaced the logo, the PDF export works fine.

[a_kralkay]

Import the title block family into a project though and print/export from there. It seems as soon as the filled region is loaded into any type of family it goes blocky.

And generic annotations don't scale. Only symbols do. Regardless, scale shouldn't matter with vector based objects.

[syman2000]

Send the sample file to Autodesk support ticket. Even if I add boundary to the fill region, it seems to always print as faceted.

[a_kralkay]

Well thanks for trying!

It's interesting that when you "export to PDF" the non-nested filled region shape is retained. But if you click "print" and use a PDF printer instead, it's faceted... There must be some processing that happens when clicking "print" that isn't happening with "export" that is causing this. I wonder if that's related to how nesting it in a family does the same thing... Like some sort of compression maybe.

I'll make sure to mention this in my support ticket.

[bdewilde]

Did you Export to PDF using Raster or Vector print setting. I have the same issue when Exporting to PDF when set to Vector.

[a_kralkay]

I always use vector for PDFs. Even if it worked on raster that wouldn't really help me unfortunately.

[a_kralkay]

Update: I contacted support and they said "I have heard back from the development team regarding the issue with filled regions. Unfortunately, this is the expected behavior for these shapes. As filled regions are made of faces, faces have edges and edges are made of straight lines.  For annotations the deviation between the arcs does have a threshold which is what is being seen with this shape."

So yeah... Apparently we're still limited by 1990's coding practises that Autodesk seems to be incapable of fixing. The didn't even say they would fix this in the future or anything. Just the typical "working as expected" cop-out and that's it. Even the support guy expressed frustration with this response. I guess we'll just add this to the pile of acknowledged issues that Autodesk refuses to fix.

[bdewilde]

Thanks for the response. If I placed the annotation in a Details family, would that solve the issue? I tried Exporting using Raster and that did not solve.

[a_kralkay]

No, that IS the issue. If you just make a filled region within the project or on a sheet it works fine. As soon as you load that filled region into a family of any sort it will appear and print blocky.