Hatch adjustment

[not_temp_username]

When we print a pdf with the hatch shown below, the hatch looks great on the preview image. Once printed, the hatch is nearly invisible in both Pdf-XChange and MS Edge. When we print the same file with Adobe Acrobat the hatch looks fine.

Everything else on the pdf looks good no matter what program we print from. It's just the hatch that looks different. Can you help us understand what is causing this and how we can resolve it?

hatch.png

[Daniel - PDF-XChange]

Hello, not_temp_username

would it be possible for you to share a copy of this document, and screenshots of the output with each application on your end for comparison? We can take a look at see what might be having an impact that way.

If the file contains sensitive data that should not be shared on a public forum, please email Support@PDF-XChange.com with a copy of those instead, and a link to this forum post.

Kind regards,

[not_temp_username]

Sorry it took me a little bit to respond. I had to get a sanitized version of that PDF with all details removed.

My guess is that Adobe PDF has some minimum line thickness setting that is making our lines thicker than they are supposed to be, and that Edge and Pdf-XChange are most likely rendering the PDF correctly.

I'm trying to get our company away from Adobe. I'd rather not even install the free Adobe PDF Reader. So if there is a setting we can change to emulate how Adobe prints, without having to make changes in our cad environment, that would greatly help with adoption.

There are two attachments below. One is the sample PDF and the picture is how it prints.

1000018074.jpg

pdf xchange-sample.pdf

[not_temp_username]

Here are some better examples.

1000018075.jpg

1000018076.jpg

[Daniel - PDF-XChange]

Hello, not_temp_username

My test prints on the physical devices I have available seem to come out looking more like your Acrobat print, with the lines clearly visible, so I don't know that there should be any difference here. I may attribute it to difference in communication method.

The first setting I can think of which could have an impact here is the line width mode, which make special allowances for devices with special handling options (intended mostly for HP printers, but can sometimes have an effect on other brands).

image.png

You could try a print on your devices with logical or device units manually selected, to see if that helps at all.
If that does not help, it may be a miscommunication between us and your printer driver. Could I ask you to first ensure that you have installed the latest "device specific" drivers, directly from the manufacturers website, and that you are not using a "generic/universal driver", which are commonly provided by windows updates after adding a new printer.

If the issue persists following that, I will need to ask for the printer Make/model, and a link to the manufacture webpage where we can download the same version of the drivers you have. With that, we may be able to emulate the issue, and compare to the data the printer sees from acrobat, to understand where the difference comes from.

Also, incase the above does not help, using "print as image" may also have a good result in the meantime.

Kind regards,

[not_temp_username]

Using our PCL print driver, we tried both settings for the line width mode and that didn't help.

We are using HP laser printers with the HP Universal Print Drivers. Judging by your response, seems this must be a pretty common problem! I have both the PCL and PostScript versions of the HP Universal print drivers installed. We haven't used the PostScript driver in years. I gave that a try and it printed perfectly!

For now, we will use the HP Universal PostScript driver as a workaround. Unfortunately, we have a very customized Cad system which has printer paper sizes saved into all our cad drawings as templates to make it easier on users. Anytime we change print drivers it usually causes more problems than it solves.

Thank you for helping us nail down the exact cause of the issue. Your help is greatly appreciated! Now that we have a good idea of what's happening, do you have any other suggestions?

[Daniel - PDF-XChange]

Hello, not_temp_username

I cannot think of anything else without consulting the Dev team. To do so though, we would need to know your printer make/model, so we can grab those drivers and run some emulation tests on this end, to compare the output.

Can I ask what is the specific model of your printer?

Kind regards,

[not_temp_username]

We have two of each:
HP LaserJet Enterprise MFP M725
HP Color LaserJet Enterprise M855

Our driver is old, but we have built around it and haven't had any problems until now.
HP Univeral Print Driver pcl6-x64-5.9.0.18326
I attached a copy of it in a zip file.

pcl6-x64-5.9.0.18326.zip

[Daniel - PDF-XChange]

Hello, not_temp_username

Thank you for that, I have added it to the conversation with the dev team, and will let you know if anything else comes up from this end.

Kind regards,