I was wondering if anyone else is having problems printing transparent elements on large roll drawings. I typically work on larger civil projects where we need to plot roll drawings of the project area. I wanted to use transparent shapes to identify various types of impacts while still being able to see the information below the shapes. However, when I rasterized my layout it took 15 min. and was only about 30% finished processing when I cancelled the plot. Has any one else tried rasterizing larger layouts with larger amounts of data? Could I be missing something in my plot config file?
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Andrew,
Thanks for the reply. I did try the PDF print driver and it worked well. I did notice that the tansparent elements did not show up in my plot preview window as transparent is this normal? - Will vector tansparancy support be added to other plot drivers?
Thanks
Dan
PowerGEOPAK SS10 and ORD
Of the plotter languages that MicroStation supports, PDF is the only one that supports vector transparency. This includes the Windows GDI calls used for print preview.
These are language limitations, not gaps in the MicroStation implementation.
For many reasons such as this I use modified pdf.pltcfg files which print directly to postscript printers or create temp pdf and open pdf reader for realistic print preview or to print using windows drivers to non-postscript printers. See this Google search for my other threads on the subject.
HTH - Roy
do I have to enable transparency somewhere or is it on by default?
and what if I use trasparent raster files in the design? does the driver fall back to non transparent vector output?
Element transparancy is a view attribute. I believe the default setting of the view attribute initially comes from your seed design file.
Raster transparency is a different topic, unrelated to the element transparency introduced in V8 XM. Completely transparent raster pixels can be printed in non-rasterized mode (although inefficiently by most printer drivers), but not partially transparent raster pixels. Partially transparent raster can only be printed correctly in rasterized mode.