Printing a File

The program can print or plot to any device that is selected from the Printers and Scanners System Preferences (Mac) or Devices and Printers Control Panel item (Windows). The actual parameters of the printed or plotted file are determined by the printer setup settings.

All visible objects, classes, and layers within the print area of the Vectorworks file are printed.

To print a file:

1. Select the command.

The Print dialog box opens; the options that display depend on which printer or plotter is selected. To display additional print options on the Mac, click Show Details.

If Vectorworks Design Series products are installed, or if you are a Vectorworks Service Select member, you can also use the Publish command to print a batch of files. See Batch Publishing.

2. Specify the print options, such as which pages to print and how many copies to make. The following Vectorworks print settings are available:

Platform	Setting	Description
Mac	Application resolution (DPI)	Sets a resolution for the application output; this affects only Vectorworks geometry and any PICT or PDF objects that must be rasterized. The resolution for bitmaps, rendered design layers, and viewports are controlled elsewhere; see Setting the Print Resolution for details. Either select a recommended DPI value for this printer type (from the drop-down list), or manually enter a value. On Mac systems, this always defaults to a minimum of 300 DPI, for optimum printing results.
Windows and Mac	Gray level for grayed layers and classes	Adjusts the level of gray when printing with grayed layers and or/classes
Windows	Enable special processing for transparent color bitmaps	When GDI+ imaging is disabled in the Vectorworks display preferences on Windows, some printers (including PostScript printers) cannot support transparent color for raster images, which can affect bitmaps and picture objects that have the fill style set to None. Select this option to use a more detailed (and slower) imaging process to print transparency properly.
Windows and Mac	Print current view only (Mac) or Current View (Windows)	Prints the view currently displayed in the file window; this view is scaled larger or smaller to fit the selected page size
Windows and Mac	Print patterns at on-screen resolution	Prints fill patterns at approximately the same size as they appear on the screen at a 100% zoom. Deselect this option to use the printer resolution, which is usually much higher, making the patterns print much smaller. This prints patterns much faster on Windows, if GDI+ imaging is disabled and you have a non-PostScript printer.
Windows	Rasterize print output	Prints the drawing as a raster bitmap. Select this option when the printer memory is insufficient, or when image problems occur (for example, to print design layer transfer modes on PostScript printers).
Windows and Mac	Update visible out of date viewports prior to printing	Automatically updates any visible, out-of-date viewports before printing
Windows and Mac	Reset all plug-in objects that require a reset prior to printing	Automatically resets plug-in objects that require an update (such as data stamps) before printing. When Publish to Print, PDF, or Image is selected, all title block borders that have an automatic plot date format are reset to today’s date.
Windows and Mac	Recalculate worksheets prior to printing	Automatically recalculates worksheets before printing

3. If the Rasterize print output option is selected, specify the edge of the image onscreen that is the first edge to come out of the printer.

The first edge to come out of the printer depends on the printer driver, the page orientation, and the rotation options that are supported by the driver. It cannot be predicted by the program. If the wrong page edge is selected, some portions of the drawing may fail to print if the printer runs out of memory.

The Rasterize print output method can be significantly slower than other print methods.

Setting the Print Resolution

The resolution at which Vectorworks objects are printed is controlled by different settings, depending on the type of object and on whether imaging preferences are enabled.

●        A raster rendered viewport is controlled by the Raster Rendering DPI setting of its sheet layer (which does not affect vector geometry or bitmaps that are inside the viewport). See Setting Sheet Layer Properties.

●        A raster rendered design layer is controlled by the Design Layer Raster Rendering DPI on the Resolution tab in the Document Preferences. See Document Preferences: Resolution Tab.

●        Vectorworks geometry is controlled by the resolution selected from the Print dialog box.

●        Rasterized PDF objects are controlled by the resolution selected from the Print dialog box. On Windows, if GDI+ imaging is not enabled, PDF objects are rasterized.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Page Boundary

Was this page helpful?