Author Topic: printing of pdfs  (Read 1380 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline gogomanTopic starter

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 123
printing of pdfs
« on: February 14, 2020, 02:26:00 pm »
How does one increase the line darkness of a schematic, the printed sheet appears light  making it difficult to read

thanks
 

Offline Pseudobyte

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 294
  • Country: us
  • Embedded Systems Engineer / PCB Designer
Re: printing of pdfs
« Reply #1 on: February 14, 2020, 03:49:49 pm »
This depends on two things. Make sure you are printing in black only and not gray-scale. If your line widths are too small you will also have lighter prints.
“They Don’t Think It Be Like It Is, But It Do”
 

Offline exmadscientist

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 404
  • Country: us
  • Technically A Professional
Re: printing of pdfs
« Reply #2 on: February 15, 2020, 05:37:09 am »
There's a DPI setting somewhere (I forget where) for PDF output. I think it's High (600), Medium (300), Low (150).

It turns out that what this actually controls is, mostly, the width of hairlines printed to PDF. I found that you should not set it to anything other than the default of 300, or you'll get subtly worse output. If you are really seeking wider hairlines, you could try setting it to 150 and see if you like that.
 

Offline Pseudobyte

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 294
  • Country: us
  • Embedded Systems Engineer / PCB Designer
Re: printing of pdfs
« Reply #3 on: February 15, 2020, 08:28:02 pm »
The pdf generation is vectorized so i don't think the dpi setting actually does anything, at least in my experience.
“They Don’t Think It Be Like It Is, But It Do”
 

Offline exmadscientist

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 404
  • Country: us
  • Technically A Professional
Re: printing of pdfs
« Reply #4 on: February 15, 2020, 11:14:37 pm »
The pdf generation is vectorized so i don't think the dpi setting actually does anything, at least in my experience.
If you don't believe me, try making outputs at each DPI setting. You'll find that it does almost nothing, but it does affect hairline width (PDF has no concept of "hairline", it needs a real width and I think AD's output routine uses "1 dot" or something analogous) and for some reason I can't possibly fathom, it screws with the text positioning slightly.

In my experience the DPI setting should never be touched from its"medium" / 300 default -- it's just going to make things ever so slightly uglier -- but if you need thicker lines, setting it lower is one way to get that.
 


Share me

Digg  Facebook  SlashDot  Delicious  Technorati  Twitter  Google  Yahoo
Smf