Printing to PDF bug
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I'm tearing my hair out at the moment trying to print a Sketchup plan to a scaled PDF. Every time I try it, I get most of the components turning out white rather than coloured as they should be (see attached). It happens with both Adobe Acrobat and Cute PDF. I've had this before, but usually one or the other software would work in combination with changing the colour management settings in the 'advanced' menu. I usually find changing it to 'graphics' and colour handled by printer or host system will work.
Has anyone else had this issue? I'm on Windows XP and trying to print to AO at ultra high definition. I've tried draft quality and taken down the resolution in case it was too much for the memory to handle but it still didn't work. I've spent the last 4 hours on it and have a deadline looming. It's a large file and every time I try it, it takes about 10 mins to see the outcome, Very frustrating! Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Kenny
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To answer my own question, I found a solution by using yet another PDF software package. I downloaded PDFCreator (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator )which was recommended previously on these boards and it worked fine. It's an unusual bug to have in two pieces of software including Adobe which I'd like to think would work perfectly, considering they invented the format!
Kenny
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@kenny said:
...including Adobe which I'd like to think would work perfectly, considering they invented the format!
without providing information which flavour and version used as well as the way creating the PDF (i.e. PDF Writer vs. Distiller <= latter rec.) this is a pretty useless statement.
Norbert
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Kenny,
There have been some issues with other SketchUp-to-(other program) exports, regarding the filenames used for texture images. If you check the names in your materials browser, you might find this is a similar cause-and-effect.
The names of texture images shouldn't have any characters from an extended character set. Stick to just letters and digits. You might even want to try avoiding spaces (using a dash or underscore, instead.) Don't use any letters with diacritical symbols (placed above a vowel to indicate a sound change.) SketchUp used to have a problem with upper-case extensions ('JPG' instead of 'jpg') but that may have been fixed. (See SketchUp Help Center topic .)
I'm really curious if this is indeed the problem. If so, it should be reported to the offending software providers. (SketchUp seems to handle them okay.)
Regards,
Taff -
Taff, you may be on to something. It seems to happen with large files with lots of materials widening the chance that one or more will afffect the export. I checked the browser and whilst they have only letters and digits, there are quite a few with spaces and capitals. It happened again today with another file, again with lots of textures. Also what often happens is while the PDF is saving the background and some of the textures change to different textures on the screen. Then when it is saved I get white components. I don't have time to investigate further but will do when I get a minute. In the meantime PDFCreator worked perfectly again so I'll stick with that until I can track down the cause.
Kenny
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@kenny said:
In the meantime PDFCreator worked perfectly again...
if one pdf creating software works fine with the same file, the file names of textures are probably not be the cause of the problem, otherwise the result would be the same, i.e. not working. Regardless of the used pdf software I in generally doubt, that the used file names do have any effect on the print output if the display output does not show any problems.
@kenny said:
It happened again today with another file, again with lots of textures. Also what often happens is while the PDF is saving the background and some of the textures change to different textures on the screen. Then when it is saved I get white components.
my assumption is, that the print output process of SU and/or the consecutive Windows GDI get some problems either simply because of the size of the print job to be created (width x heigth x resolution x color depth) or the involved OpenGL support required for rendering the output does have some glitches (btw, which video card and driver version do you use?).
Norbert
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Your network might be the culprit too, if you are printing the file to a network drive. You might try printing to the desktop or some other local folder and see how it goes. I often get corrupt image files when exporting to a network location, and they usually are OK when exported to a folder on my desktop. I am also suspecting the network for the similarly truncated PDFs (with some lines and texts missing) we recently got when printing to PDF from AutoCad with Adobe Acrobat, and that printed perfectly when repeated another day.
Just suggestions
Anssi
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