Rhino 8 - Printing PDFs - Nightmare Thread

Serengeti (Rhino WIP)
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Hello Mcneel Team and Fellow Contributors.

I’m very unhappy with the way printing (specifically PDF export) is being handled in V8. It seems that this functionality is severely broken, convincing me to downgrade my 3dm or to try printing in another software.
So, I’m going to do you a favor to break down the problem into small bites so we can agree on the urgency of ironing them before the release.

1- Printing a Set of (12) Layouts: often prints the same layout 12 times and ignores the rest of the pages, this happens when you set the view and output scale to ( window ) , See the video below:


and the result is showing the same page 12 times.

2- Printing Vector Always Prints in Raster. Looking into YT history it seems that this issue is lingering from few years ago and it happens when Gamma correction is enabled in the render settings, even if the Gamma value was set to 1. also disabled my V-Ray Plugin.

This issue seems to happen when printing multiple pages at once

3- Print Scaling issues: it often defaults to the wrong page size and when matching the layout, things go way out of scale.


The sheet was printed resulting in a 36mm x 24mm instead of 36in x 24in
image
image1145×781 99.9 KB

I was able to reproduce it on a fresh file:


issues.3dm (336.5 KB)

4- Printing the new linetypes, doesn’t scale the line widths in relation to the scale of the detail on that sheet, resulting in a very inconsistent line width across the drawing set.
reported by @Joe4 in the thread below:

Print width of line in Rhino8 beta - Rhino / Rhino for Windows - McNeel Forum

5- Failure to print hatches: reported here.

image
image1891×1107 149 KB

Rhino 8 Bug : Some Solid hatches won’t print from a layout - Serengeti (Rhino 8 BETA) - McNeel Forum

6- No Progress Bar, I’m relying on the UI freeze to indicate the progress of the print. Reported here (2 years ago)
Rhino PDF Printer driver print status dialogue box? - Serengeti (Rhino 8 BETA) - McNeel Forum

7- No File in use warning, reported here
Rhino 8 - Rhino PDF, No File Access Warning if the file is open - Serengeti (Rhino 8 BETA) - McNeel Forum

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Glad I’m not the only one. Seems like there are bunches of issues to fix.

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this is too much. so many issues. with printing. in version 8. soon before release. its like a theme for this version.

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Thanks @tay.othman please know that we have eyes on these and know the print dialog is in a dumb state. We’re plugging away at it and also have a small sprint planned to these issues within the next 2 weeks. I’ll post a few yt’s here later today.

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Thank you Trav, glad to hear that.

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Yes please ! I’ve been looking for such a thread for a few days now, but didn’t know where to address this. Printing feels really frustrating on V8, mainly for its inconsistencies : you never know what will happen after you hit cmd+P

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If you can, please look into this issue as well - the size/resolution print settings should be unified for images and PDF.
Thanks!

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Hi @Eugen this is something we can hopefully implement in v9.

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V9 WIP you mean? °.°
You mentioned that the print dialog is unter active maintenance at the moment. Squeeze this in, and be done with it?
Nag…

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its like including bold text in one version but wait for italics in another… there is only that much to properly address printing entirely once and for all. there is basically nothing to invent just implement.

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More usability issue:
8- Printing Multiple Layouts, when deselecting specific sheets, it won’t remember the last configuration. so, when printing again I’m forced to uncheck the sheets again and again.

image
image841×389 22.1 KB

Waiting again for a couple of minutes (because there is no progress Bar) …

image

so, the expected behavior will be either:
A- Rhino Remembers the last printed set of layouts and applies it Automatically, so any that were sheets previously excluded will continue to be excluded until I adjust them.
B- Create another variable that allows the user to save “Print Sets” as a dropdown list where I can toggle the different list of sheets to be included for different packages. (Which is the Preferred Option for me)

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Also for me! +1

In Archicad, such a thing is called “Publisher Set”, btw.

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V9??? I could have had a V8! I’ve often wished the print to image file worked with standard sizes. Doesn’t seem like that big of a request. Why wait?

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PLEASE fix this asap!!

Tay: I must say that your drawings look pretty amazing from what I can see!!

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Totally! Revit call it print set, and even AutoCAD has it since 2004 called “Sheet Set Palette” where you can assign multiple layouts from multiple files and batch print them.

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Thank you @keithscadservices . I’m trying to! This is a smaller project that I’m currently working on using V8 only. Many of the issues / bugs appeared while using V8 for full project tasks. First Rendering issues, then UI issues, then Model Clipping issue and finally the printing issues.

Glad to see the developers here are willing to jump immediately into the urgent stuff and fixing them promptly. But there is much to do in the short period of time.

I must admit that I should’ve started using it way before the BETA period began just because a lot of features / functionalities will likely won’t be added into this release. Unless mcneel decided to prove me wrong.

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I agree. Some of the issues we see now in 8-Beta SR0 should have been fixed in 7 SR3X before the WIP moved to Beta. There is still a large workload to be fixed before 8 can be a “Release Candidate”.

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Have you by any chance found the Print Preview function in 8-Beta when printing multiple Layouts? I’m looking for it, but have been unable to find anything similar to the thing at the top here in 7.

Rhino-7_SRXX_PrintPreview_Has_PreviousPage+NextPage
Rhino-7_SRXX_PrintPreview_Has_PreviousPage+NextPage772×1079 164 KB

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I’m running 8.1 and I don’t have access to this thing.

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9- More issues regarding external PDF printers (Bluebeam and PDF24)

printing a set of sheets with a size ARCH D - 36"x24" the sizes are different on the outputs.

Here is the print preview:

image
image1971×932 278 KB

Here is the result from PDF24 (Printer)

image
image1155×883 113 KB

Here is the result from Bluebeam’s Revu Printer

image
image1254×582 23.5 KB