Notes on Printing

One of the useful features of ArchiCAD (since 6.0) and PlotMaker (since 2.1) is that fills can have a background color. Still, in some cases, a few problems can appear when printing on the Windows platform due to the different printer driver implementations. On the Macintosh the different printer drivers work the same way as before.

Please note that all of the information in this document concerns the Windows platform only.

There are two major groups of problems: printing of bitmap patterns and the bright, unsaturated color lines.

Bitmap pattern printing
Polygons are set to bitmap mode in the Display Options dialog box of the Options menu.

The printed fill patterns can look very strange on the paper, because the resolution is device-dependent. On the Windows platform, all printer drivers implement bitmap fills the same way: one screen pixel corresponds to one printer pixel (for example, 81 dpi will be translated into 300 dpi). Patterns are reduced according to the ratio between the two resolutions.

The background of transparent fills can also turn to black depending on the printer driver.

Hint: Avoid bitmap printing and use vectorial printing mode instead. Set the fills in the Display Options dialog to Vectorial Hatching.

If you are using the Dithering option of ArchiCAD's Print dialog box, the resulting image is finer (ArchiCAD's built-in dithering will be used instead of the driver's default). Please note that it can slightly slow down the printing process.

Color lines
The thick lines (i.e., the contour lines of a wall or the hatch lines in vectorial mode) are handled as fills if they are more than four pixels thick in printer resolution. Thin lines (four or less pixels thick according to printer resolution) are printed on Black/White printers in either black or white, depending on their brightness.
On color printers the line can practically disappear from the drawing when printed.

Hints: On Black/White printers, print all colors to black.

In case of color printers, use saturated colors on the floor plan, for example the basic colors (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, Red, Green and Blue) or any other color that approximates these.

PrinterTest
We have developed a small utility program called PrinterTest.exe. When starting this program a test figure appears on the screen which shows the fills and lines used in ArchiCAD in (almost) every variation. In the Edit menu you can choose whether the fills should be opaque (Change mode.../Copy) or transparent (Change mode.../Transparent). Select the desired color (Edit/Change color...) and choose the Print command in the File menu and set the appropriate settings in the Properties sheet. After printing the Test page, compare it to the screen example. If you see any difference, the problem is with your printer driver. Please check on the printer vendor's website that you are using the newest printer driver. We recommend using this test program every time you install a new printer or a new driver for your printer.

To learn more about the PrinterTest program please read its readme.

Download PrinterTest.exe and its ReadMe.txt file here

Page last updated: Thursday, September 16, 2004