Why is Revit not printing what i see on screen to pdf?

[mattPQE2F]

The way I understand it Revit is supposed to print what i see on screen as i see it on screen. Why is Revit not printing what i see on screen?

What I see on screen

 What is being printed to PDF?

[ToanDN]

If you are talking about the lineweights then turn off Thin Lines (TL) in revit.

[mattPQE2F]

Its set to thin lines and still printing incorrectly, but what I'm talking about is the overlap on the text. Don't really care about the lineweights need the next to legible. 

[iainsavage]

Probably something to do with the printer settings regarding embedding fonts or using font substitution.

[hmunsell]

what PDF driver are you using? I have found I get different results with different drivers sometimes.

[HVAC-Novice]

Are you using the "export to PDF" function, or a 3rd party PDF printer? If the latter, switch to the native Revit PDF function. 

[mattPQE2F]

Bluebeam

[mattPQE2F]

I dont even see an export to PDF function anymore, I know I've seen it before, tried microsoft to PDF and got the same result

[HVAC-Novice]

Export to PDF was added in 2021 or so. Another thought, are those lines of text native to Revit, or something imported from CAD? Does it look like that for all text, or just annotations? How about dimensions etc?

[mattPQE2F]

They are native to Revit, just the annotations, the dimensions look like this

[HVAC-Novice]

Looks like you are using some goofy visibility, like realistic or consistent colors. What's all the pink stuff? Or those green bubble things? Looks like sketched and not modelled. Does it work in "hidden Line" view? Did you always have that problem, or just with this project? Does it work for non-colored projects? Maybe share your model for someone to see what is going on. Possible whatever you do with the graphics is causing this. Maybe try a new project with just a template from oob and see if that prints properly and then find out whatever changes (all the coloring and different line weights) could cause this. I just use oob as much as possible (fonts etc. and no changes to dimension styles etc.) and it works for me perfectly. But my plans are not colored (except certain colored systems). I usually can see if a plan sheet was made with Revit. If someone would ask me about yours, I would guess some contractor used some other software.

[mattPQE2F]

No its revit, your looking at a cut view of an existing pipe rack that we we'ren't provided backgrounds for so we had to import an NWD, not a sketch the piping is modeled content. Nothing goofy with the settings, it is a hidden line view, the only thing is the NWD background has been adjusted to be a little transparent. Just started happening on this project recently, not throughout the whole course.

[HVAC-Novice]

If your method worked before, open up an old project where it worked and see if it still prints properly. If it does, something in your current project is off and you need to find out the difference. If the old project now also doesn't print properly, it may be something with Windows/PDF printer that may have changed due to updates. But ultimately really use the Revit export function. Not only does it work, it also excludes any goofiness with 3rd party (inc. microsoft OS functions) printers. Since we have native PDF export, I never used a 3rd party printer and never had issues. Also make sure you have everything up to date (Revit, Windows, and 3rd party printer if you really want to use that). I also have Bluebeam (but don't use it for Revit) and every once a while they need to update an update since something breaks. Again, use the export function to avoid any such hassle.

[mattPQE2F · Accepted solution]

Emptied out the temp folder and it fixed the issue

[HVAC-Novice]

Thanks for posting the solution. It reminded me to do the same.... emptying temp folder is one of the maintenance items for Revit (and of course we never do it unless we have a problem 🙂

[mattPQE2F]

Yeah for sure, of course it was the temp folder.

[iainsavage]

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@HVAC-Novice  schrieb:

Since we have native PDF export, I never used a 3rd party printer and never had issues. 

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That's fair enough but similarly I use DiRoots Prosheets which utilises PDF24 and similarly I've never had any problems. Not all 3rd party apps are the same and they are not all bad.