How to get a good print off of somebody's else drawings?

[imsengr]

Ok, here is my situation. I receive a *.dwg format drawing in a CD from somebody, in my case the Architect. I can open the drawing easily enough although it is done in Paper Space while we do most of our drawings in Model space. Of course, as most of you would know, the text fonts, layer properties, colors, etc. are completely strange as it is done in somebody's else. We also mainly use just a few colors (white, green, blue, red, purple, thin, etc.) but the drawings from the architect contains all the colors in the template.

When I try to make a print of the drawing, I see very blurred lines and very blurred text. The text even appears to be "fused". There is none of those very sharp lines that you get from any *.dwg drawing. I suspect the these "fused and blurred" lines and text were done as blocks in the original drawings, and since I do not have the same settings as the architect, am not able to print the drawings properly.

I tried to "cut and paste" the architects and bring it into my own drawing but a lot of information information are missing! These must be the "reference blocks" while are not in my file. I tried "exploding" the Contractor's blocks but they would not be "exploded".

Could someone please advise how to get a good print off of somebody's else's drawings, and/or what my particular problem is, and how to rectify it?

Thanks a bunch.

 

[diamondjim]

Would you be willing to post the drawing
file on the net to have a look at it?

 

[CarlB]

Ask for the Architect's ctb file. Use that file when plotting so lineweights will be same as theirs. You can place the xxxx.ctb file in the same folder as the drawing, or put it in the pltter support directory (which you can find by typing PLOTTERMANAGER).

 

[IFRs]

They to give you all the support files needed - especially fonts. The font file should fix the blurry text. Blurry lines I wonder about. Seems odd unless they are images inserted into the drawing.

 

[borgunit]

Look at the print preview. If you print in black and white, make sure the preview is B&W, otherwise you may be printing in color and B&W printers print those in greys and they look "fuzzy". Control this with PlotStyles when plotting.

"Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects." — Will Rogers

 

[JStephen]

Setting the plot style table to "Monochrome" will help in a lot of cases.

Among other problems, the drawings you get in may be in color when you only print in B&W, or may be in paper sizes you don't support.

 

[TravisMack]

This is a common problem when getting files from other design professionals. I don't know about AutoCAD 2005 or higher, but 2004 has a command called "eTransmit." I simply ask the other design professionals to use eTransmit when sending files. This will have AutoCAD grab all of the support files: fonts, ctb, XREFs, etc. Then you can put everything where you need it and print exactly like the originating person would.

 

[SteveFehr]

Laser printers will often plot color drawings as grayscale, and dither the grayscale, which ends up looking horrible. If you just want everything to be nice dark lines (and not soft fuzzy gray ones) open up monochrome.ctb and highlight all the pens. Turn dither and grayscale off for everything and save it. Your plots should be nice and dark now

Unfortunately there's no easy way to change all their layer colors short of actually changing all their layer colors, at least not that I'm aware of. They might have drafted using a black background which would be very hard to read against a black modelspace; if so, then you can just turn paperspace black and it'll be easier to see on screen.