Problems printing large PDF's lately

[gwubs]

At our company we PDF all of our released drawings for printing. We have recently noticed that our larger (D size, 2.5 mb) print jobs are missing sections, that is sections of the drawing are blank. We are printing to an HP designjet 500 with 16 mb. of RAM and an HPLG card built in. These drawings have not been a problem in the past. Is anyone aware of a change that has been made in SW, Adobe, or Windows? Anyone experiencing the same thing? Our IT guy wants us to save our drawings as image files, but that is not practical for us.

 

[fcsuper]

I've seen problems like this, and are using HP printers too. It is random and (from what I've seen) happens when you save as PDF. It does seem to happen more often when someone switches between applications or windows while the drawing is being saved as a PDF.

Matt Lorono
Lorono's SolidWorks Resources & SolidWorks Legion

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

Have you recently upgraded or updated SW?
Does HP have a newer driver for the printer?
How are you creating the PDFs?
From what program are you printing the PDFs?
Do the print previews look OK?

 

[BluTurtle]

Not sure if this works. But you can try this. Download & install

http://www.cutepdf.com

(Free)
After this you will find a new printer (Cutepdf) in your printers list. Choose this & try printing. It will prompt for a file name, type your desired name & checkit out.BT

 

[gwubs]

CBL - good point, getting down to specifics. I'll answer questions in order.

We have not made any changes to SW. We are all running 2007 sp.5
I don't know whether HP has a new driver, since we no longer have access to the network setup.
We are creating PDF's from SW - save as PDF, and also using the pdf printer which installs with Adobe.
We are printing PDF's frome Adobe Acrobat 8 Pro
Yes, the print previews always look fine.

fcsuper - I'll test the condition you are describing.
Thanks all

 

[Overworked1]

Try hitting Ctrl-P to print, and when the print window
pops up, hit "advanced" in the lower left hand corner. From there, check the "print as image" check box. We have had success printing larger PDF's after checking that box.

Aaron
SolidWorks (x64)/PDMWorks 09 3.0
CADKey 99 R1.0 (Yes, still using it!)