Pixelated Drawing Files

I have a large product that I need to make a shaded print-out of. Whenever I make a plot of the drawing file, the output looks like a screen grab ie: a screen grab scaled up to 3 ft wide with immense pixels. Does anyone have suggestions? My document image properties are turned all the way up. The Printer settings ask Solidworks to convert Draft to High Quality and the views are set to High Quality. I do not want to create a high resolution tiff because dimensions might be off while parts and certain faces have a propensity to disappear. Does anyone know how to make high quality shaded plots from Solidworks?

Do you have PhotoWorks? That's my solution, so I've never tried to find out if there was another.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

Well- I'm asking because for some strange reason I have 1(!) printout that is pristine and high-res. It is the oddest thing. The plotter took a long time processing and out came the best shaded plot ever with no pixellation whatsoever and I have not been able to recreate the setting since!

The work-around I have been told is to save your drawing file as a TIFF. This gives you the control to save a Print Capture at 300DPI (or whatever resolution you wish) It is a tedious process, but is a work-around. Just wondering if anyone has done this without the workaround.

Hello-

"The work-around I have been told is to save your drawing file as a TIFF. This gives you the control to save a Print Capture at 300DPI (or whatever resolution you wish) It is a tedious process, "

I use this process, it's not too tedious, just a couple of clicks and the results are good.

Best Regards, Devon T. Sowell

How do you ascertain scale? I have had to take these into Illustrator and print from there. The tiffs are quite large in comparison to the drawings (appox 40-50 MB each) and I would rather the plotter have to crunch on that for a while rather than me. :)

After editing the .tiff, save it as a .jpg to help reduce file size.

Best Regards, Devon T. Sowell

Lossy forms of compression for drawings aren't a great idea in total. You're much better off with a good form of lossless image compression. For CAD drawings, the PNG format turns out to be almost perfect.

PNG is very good at compressing large areas of uniform color and shading. Whereas JPEG discards information in its cosine transformation, uniform areas and gradients are mathematically stored and compressed in PNG.

So whereas your equivalent TIFF might be 50-100MB depending on resolution, a PNG might be able to compress that into 7-10MB depending on your detail. I've even seen cases where a 48MB file goes to about 900KB.

Have you tried printing directly from Solidworks to a raster printer driver? You should be able to get the quality you need in lossless JPEG, TIFF, PDF, GIF, or PNG format.

Regards, Andrei