AutoCAD 2012 Incomplete Printing Output

by Dennis Collin

I had a few support calls recently with issues where problems were apparent with truncated or incomplete printing output from AutoCAD (although it could be any Autodesk product), to any printer. NB. in my example I am using a Hewlett Packard (HP) printer as a particular product example. But the printer/plotter could be of any brand.

Situation: you are printing out a drawing and are missing key parts of your document. (Plotting to PDF results in a complete image however) This event rules out non plottable objects or settings like layers. In AutoCAD for example it may include paper space objects but not model space elements.

The problem is that certain print files with large amounts of raster data (or exploded hatch!!) result in vast print file sizes. (If this exceeds your printer memory then incomplete outputs can occur when outputting to paper).

The first thing to check is your printer settings and in particular how it handles the printing of the document.

Find your printer and right click on it and choose Properties (possibly Printer Properties)

This should bring up a dialogue something similar to the following;

We need to ensure that the printer processing or rendering is handled via the computer, this should be ticked.

(In my example it is greyed out for me as the device configuration  is handled by a print server which I don’t have permissions for), but you may be able to click it, and it should solve this particular problem, alternatively talk to your local IT support engineer, who will be able to tweak the memory handling option for you .

For the HP Designjet range of printers some other options may be available that may also be able to cure incomplete printing results.

Try the following recommendations to solve this issue.

• In the Advanced tab, select Document options, Printer features, and set Send job as bitmap to Enabled(HP-GL/2 driver only).
• In the Advanced tab, select Document options, Printer features, and set 16-bit App. Compatibility to Enabled.
• In the Advanced tab, select Document options, Printer features, and set Max. Application resolution to 300.

 
The above settings are mentioned for troubleshooting purposes and may adversely affect the final output quality or the time necessary to generate the print job. Therefore, they should be restored to their default values if they do not help to solve the problem.

If you are working under Mac OS or using a PostScript driver, the above settings will not be available. Instead, you could try reducing the resolution of bitmap images in your application software.