Printing 2E pdfs

[Ed Reppert]

I tried printing some 2E pdfs. With the iconic character sheets, the character portrait overlaps some of the data, as does the fancy nameplate at the top of the page. With the Age of Ashes player's guide, well, there's entirely too much colored ink - backgrounds, pictures, whatever. Printing its 11 pages got me the cover page, with the "by James Jacobs" graphic element overlapping the "player's guide" graphic element, several pages of nothing but black backgrounds with some artwork around the ages, and none of the actual useful data in the document. Used up a lot of ink and got nothing but some very wet pages.

I don't know whether this is an artifact of poorly set up pdfs, of my pdf reader (MacOS's Preview app) or of my printer. I doubt the last two, because I've printed older (first edition) pdfs from Paizo with no problems. Which leaves me with "wtf is going on here? Does Paizo want us not to print these things?"

Anybody else having this kind of problem?

[ograx]

I printed mine just fine. It will come out wet because they are so dark and you are laying down so much ink I would try maybe putting the printer on the lowest quality print setting as possible and make sure its set for regular printer paper.

[Denim N Leather]

Mine came out great as well. I use 24lb paper and printed them in greyscale; looks fine!

[Vic Wertz]

I'm a longtime Mac user myself, but I unfortunately have to say that Apple's Preview app does a very poor job when it comes to PDF rendering (on screen or print). The overlapping you're talking about sounds very much like an issue with their rendering engine.

While you may have varying degrees of success with other PDF viewers, the only PDF viewing app that I personally have any confidence in (regardless of your operating system) is Adobe Acrobat Reader DC. I'm pretty confident that using that will solve those problems.

[Tim Schneider 908]

I always print my PDF's with Adobe Reader like Vic suggested & it worked fine for all the 2E printing I've done - mostly the iconics & PFS handouts/chronicles.

I use FoxIt for viewing & I GM off it frequently (It's ability to split-screen a PDF and view 2 separate pages at once is invaluable when the statblocks are put at the end of the scenarios & I've found my battery lasts longer than with Adobe's). Seems to handle on-screen ok but it's always struggled to print Paizo PDF's for some reason. Even trying to print a chronicle off the end of a PFS scenario seems to generate a few hundred meg of data into the printer spooling job until the printer just starts crying in the corner. But printing with adobe's always been an easy workaround.

[Ed Reppert]

Well, I got it to print in greyscale in AR, and it looks okay, but it refused to print 2-sided. Apparently there's no option in AR's printer routine to do that. :-(

I'll take a look at some other options.

[Tim Schneider 908]

There should be one - a checkbox "Print on both sides of paper" right above the page orientation. I use it all the time. I think it depends on if your printer supports it - it hides when I'm printing to PDF.

[Ed Reppert]

Nope. It's there in Preview, not in AR. Maybe AR thinks my printer doesn't support it, but if it didn't I wouldn't have brought it up. :-)

[Grim Ranger]

On the Mac I find that to get the "Two Sided" checkbox I often have to click the "Printer..." button (usually located near the bottom left of the print dialog box), which brings up a second print dialog box that has the option available. Check it and click "Print" (which won't actually start the print job, it'll just save the setting), and then it will work.

[Ed Reppert]

Hm. I did try that, and it didn't work.

[Grim Ranger]

It's always worked for me, but I probably have a different printer than you do; sorry. :-(