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Michael The Curate
Known Participant
January 1, 2024
Question

Very thin lines do not print correctly

  • January 1, 2024
  • 2 replies
  • 8616 views

I got a subscription to Acrobat because of the ability to print PDFs across multiple pages but it is not printing my very fine lines correctly. I am using very fine lines in my drawing and when printed they are all wrong.  To see what was going wrong I made a test image of concentric rectangles whose line thickness is getting gradually thinner. It prints OK in Sumatra PDF and if I rasterise the image to 600dpi but Acrobat just prints a black mess. I have spent days trying wvarious printer and viewer settings and searching the internet but I cannot find a solution.

 

 

As you can see, the very thin lines are printing as a thick blackness but only with Acrobat.

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    2 replies

    Brad @ Roaring Mouse
    Brad @ Roaring Mouse
    Community Expert
    January 8, 2024

    You're comparing apples to oranges here in terms of the printing technology.

    When you print from Acrobat, the object instructions (postscript code) that define the lines are converted to a raster for your particular printer. e.g. if you're printing to a typical 600dpi printer, the smallest line that can be printed can be no thinner than 1 pixel.  One pixel on a 600 dpi printer is equivalent to 0.12 pt stroke. Any line you send that's thinner than that will print at 0.12 pt. So if you have a bunch of them very close to each other like in your sample file, it will easily clump up like that. And depending on how this falls on the printer's fixed raster grid, it can very well cause lines next to each other to be double (2 pixels) thick. There is a routine in Postscript printers that will try and reposition very thin lines so this effect is minimal, but it cannot prevent it, and, this is only on PS printers. Non-PS printers like a typical PCL laser writer does things differently, as do Inkjets using scatter dot technology

    Your other two samples are doing things differently... Both of these have converted your thin lines to an image raster that is essentially greyscaling/dithering your lines. There are no actual solid 100% black "lines" at that size. This is also how a scatterdot printer will do it, and if you look at your printed sample, you can see, close-up, it's all random dots.

    Now, if you're printing to a high-res imagesetter at a commercial printer with a resolution upwards of 2400 dpi or more, you can produce finer lines. However, conversely, if you print to a 300 dpi printer, it will get worse (minimum .24 pt).

     

    btw: the Enhance Thin Lines is purely a display setting. It does not affect print at all..

    A
    Arwel
    New Participant
    May 2, 2024

    Hi, I have a similar problem. It is certainly Adobe. I have a PDF created in AutoCAD, and it prints great from Bluebeam Revu.

    However, when printed from Adobe, it misses random thin lines. 

    Any suggestions?

    M
    Michael The CurateAuthor
    Known Participant
    May 2, 2024

    None of the suggestions I was given worked so I gave up and I use Sumatra
    PDF to print now.

    Michael McLaughlin,

    [P.I Removed by Moderator]

    M
    Michael The CurateAuthor
    Known Participant
    January 1, 2024

    I added a title to each image but they don't seem to have shown up. The first image is a photo of an Acrobat printout. The second is of a Sumatra prinout. The third is a rasterised PNG printout and the fourth is a screen shot of the image in Acrobat.

     

    This image is a photo of all three printouts together. 

    M
    Michael The CurateAuthor
    Known Participant
    January 1, 2024

       Another testfile shows that below a certain thickness the lines actually print thicker than a thicker line. I have set Fix Hairlines threshold in print preproduction to 0 (zero pt) but it seems to ignore that below a certain thickness.

    Luke Jennings3
    Luke Jennings3
    Community Expert
    January 2, 2024

    Hi Amal,

     

    As I said, I think this will be a problem for anyone. I tried it on my work computer using Acrobat Reader instead of Acrobat Pro and printing to a PDF with Microsoft Print to PDF with the same result. Sumatra gives a perfect print and Acrobat makes the lines thicker when the thickness goes below 25/1000 ths of an inch.

    Have you tried printing  my test file to see if you also have the problem? I think you will find that you do. In fact I will put my money where my mouth is. I will personally give you €100 if you do not have the exact same bug in your version of Acrobat.

     

    Michael

     


    Try turning off the Acrobat page display preference to "enhance thin lines", although I believe this should only affect page display. If this helps, you could use the flattener preview to convert all strokes (lines) to outlines (shapes) which might print correctly regardless of Acrobat preference.

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