Cannot print to large format printer

Question

I have had to marry an arch/landscape drawing to a PDF. The original PDF is one of those 'small area plan' map (done by a design firm) with cross sections and photos of what the designer conceptualizes for activity in the area. I opened this PDF in Illustrator for the process.

The drawing was done on tracing paper, cleaned up, saved as a PNG file in PS (for transparency), and added as a layer to the PDF in Illustrator.

I have even rotated the document in preparation for print and saved the file as such.

I have none of the original photos--just the design firm's PDF. I have saved the file as smallest PDF in hopes to print, flattening it to make it smaller, but it will not print on our HP Designjet. As the file loads to print, I see that the file is being flattened. (but I already did that...) I then see an error message. For the life of me, we cannot get the drawing to print from Illustrator or from Acrobat.

What can I do to make this work? Time is drawing neigh... Any advice would be appreciated.

Monika Gause · Accepted Answer

There are gazillions and gazillions of paths in this file. Would it help to rasterize everything? Except maybe the text and of course with sufficient resolution. Some images in the PDF are in rather bad quality because of compression. So maybe it's not the images, but the huge amount of vector paths?

Do you have any specifications for the printer? What kind of files can it accept? how large can they be? What kind of content is acceptable? That's what I would investigate.

Also: the font. Did you successfully print Avenir in the past? I seem to remember that some versions of it have issues of some sort.

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