Documents printing too faint.

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
April 27, 2017
3 replies
26832 views

Here is my problem. I have to modify a large number of engineering drawings, all of which are in pdf format. I convert them to dwg format and edit them in DraftSight, convert them back to pdf ( I cannot print from Draftsight) and print them. The prints come out a rather faint grey instead of black and I can find no way of improving the printer output. Has anyone else encountered this issue?

Print and prepress

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Abambo

According to your description I would select the printer driver or the printing settings as the culprit. The driver is different and settings may be different.

D

davidm90411842

Participant

I'm late to the game, but dropping this off to help the next searcher.

The issue is that all the lines and text are being stored as scalable vectors and thus the lines will automatically use whatever minimum scale the output device has. This meant larger pixels on the screen vs 1200 dpi thin lines on the printer that are almost unreadable.

In Acrobat, select Advanced and check Print as Image with 300dpi or 150dpi to raise the minimum pixel size for the vectors.

B

brandiesmith

Participant

This worked perfectly - my drivers were UTD and I hadn't previously had issues. I'm not sure how that setting got changed (either in the last update or in how our engineering company is saving the drawings) but this resolved the issue. Thank you!

Dov Isaacs

Legend

Make sure that if you are running Acrobat or Reader under Windows, you don't have the Save ink/toner option checked in the print dialog. That option could conceivably cause the symptoms you describe.

Another source of problems with output from CAD programs is that often they output exceptionally thin lines and that when printing, very narrow lines are printed that cause black to appear grey.

Of course, if you could post a sample of such a file yielding this problem, we could ascertain what is really going on!

- Dov

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)

peggyy23064978

Participant

I'm having same issue with one of my coworkers - they print a page from a manual that has a CAD drawing on it - using Acrobat Reader DC and Win10 machine - drawing is faint. Another coworker prints same page to same printer using Acrobat DC on Win7 machine - and it prints darker and able to read CAD drawing. Any ideas?

Abambo

Correct answer

Community Expert

According to your description I would select the printer driver or the printing settings as the culprit. The driver is different and settings may be different.

ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer