Pdf Print Problem For Engineering Drawings

[William Osborne]

Hi,

I have certain PDF drawings (converted from CAD) which look ok when I open them on the computer screen but when I go to print them there are covered in random lines..(I'm using Adobe Acrobat 6 Pro)

I tried printing on another computer and they come out ok ? Tried everything like hiding sigs/stamps etc

Any ideas ?? cheers

[welo]

Try to convert them to a lower PDF version before printing.

Printer driver problem?

Printer hardware problem?

Printer memory problem?

Which program do you use for printing?

welo

[William Osborne]

Try to convert them to a lower PDF version before printing.

Printer driver problem?

Printer hardware problem?

Printer memory problem?

Which program do you use for printing?

welo

Hooked up to the office printer, no other problems, the lines are like they have been left over from whoever CAD'ed the original drawings ie they go diagonally from one point to another like tracks of a mouse pointer..

Weird... I even tried re-printing them again to PDF printer, document looks fine until i print it on paper.

[moobie]

As an Engineering Draughtsman and ex-Drawing Office manager I can only speculate that the "hidden" lines are more than likely on the pdf but are in the same colour as the background colour.

One way around this may be to capture/copy the screen image and paste it into a program such as Paint. Then print it. Beware of resolution issues which may need to be tweaked to obtain the best image.

Good Luck.

[welo]

Don't know much about CAD, but some about PDF. PDF uses Postscript, a complex 'programming language' to describe graphical documents. What moobie says makes perfect sense to me, there might be lines in the document that are maybe set to white color or to zero width or something similar.

AFAIK a PDF document only has one representation that does not differ between screen and print (as opposed to web pages or Word documents).

Maybe the printer driver causes those issues.

You probably have no possibility of changing the original CAD drawing, right? You could open the PDF document in Adobe Illustrator, which supports PDF and postscript files natively. The lines should show up there even if 'invisible' and you should be able to delete them. There is a trial version of Illustrator, however, it is a professional drawing program that is not that easy to handle...

welo

[xen]

I don't know if it will help but u may be able ask for the drawings to be sent to you in DWG format and download a DWG viewer and see if the lines are there. It sounds like to me it could be another layer in the original CAD drawings there.

[William Osborne]

ok, cheers for replies.... am going on leave for few weeks, so not to worry ...