I’m having trouble printing nodes with dashed lines using paths or polylines if the diagram is scaled down. When this happens the dashed lines appear solid or with some other rendering artifacting depending on the settings of the printer used. These issues do not appear when editing or manipulating the diagram including changing its scale.
This problem does not seem to affect the links on the diagram that also use dashed lines even if the same pattern is set in the dash array.
I’m trying to figure out why my links are immune to this issue but when I use lines in a node they are distorted. Is there something special being done to the links that prevents this problem that I would be able to use in my paths/polylines?
I don’t know about that. Do you have some screenshots? What print template(s) are you using?
This is an image of the lines in the application:
This is what it looks like when sent to the printer after being scaled down slightly.
I’m using a printing template I created, the scaling is done to fit a larger diagram to a single page so the amount can be a lot different than this sample but the results are the same.
I have no idea. Is there styling in your app that might be (unintentionally) different when printing?
Are these results reliably reproducible?
What if you print to a completely different kind of printer?
I’ve tested on several different printers and PDF print drivers, seems to happen across all of them.
The issue may not appear if the diagram is only slightly scaled but using a test diagram I can reproduce it reliably. The template does not change when scaling is used.
I have noticed in my testing today that Windows 8 machines don’t seem to be affected by the issue but every Windows 7 machine I have tried is.
I suppose I could experiment some trying to reproduce the problem.
If you can reproduce it in a simple app, I’d appreciate it.
Searching the web for this problem might be useful too.
I’ve found a work around that works in place of a fix. Setting the lines opacity to 95% seems to cause them to print correctly. I’m testing this change with users now to see if it fixes the problem for us and doesn’t cause any new issues.
Other interesting information is the issue doesn’t seem to be present in Windows 8.1 64-bit as I tested it on several machines but I was able to reproduce in other Windows 7 machines.
It sure sounds like a Windows problem.
Thanks for posting your work-around, in case anyone else runs into this same problem.