Illustrator 10 - "Can't Print Illustration"

[Laurence Felton]

I hope that someone can help me with this one - I'm about at my wits end! I've been printing OK from Illustrator 10 until I used the "Page Tool" to try and get it to print correctly to a wide format printer. Since then, every time I try to print anything which has text in it I get the error message "Can't Print Illustration". This is whether I choose any of the 3 printers connected to the network, or Distiller. Photoshop and Indesign print OK. I can work around this to an extent by rasterising the image before printing, but this is (a) a pain (b) makes the text look "blocky" when printed out. I downloaded the 10.0.3 patch and installed that. I also deleted the Illustrator prefs file. In desperation, I've even re-installed Illustrator & then re-installed the patch.

I've searched the on-line help & can't seem to find anything relevant.

Any suggestions would be gratefully received!

[Laurence Felton]

[TREVOR BRYDEN]

Dear Laurence:
This happened to me one time and I was trying to get something printed on an outside printer. I wasn't successful at the time but I think my problem was that the printer that I was trying to use wasn't recognizing my fonts. I never got the chance to try it but I think that if I had of 'expanded' my type faces then the printer would have recognized it as just another vector object.
Worth a try ......... Trevor

[Ian A. Wright]

Laurence:

Create a new document and draw a small rectangle. Do you get the same error when you print that? If so, go into Document Setup, choose Transparency from the pop-up menu and move the Quality slider all the way to the left (should be OK since you're printing non-PostScript anyway). At least I assume that you are not -- you don't say. You might also try changing the Bitmap Printing selection in the Print dialog box.

Have a look around the entire artboard and see if there is anything way off the "page" area.

[James Cleary]

I'm having the same (or at least very similar) problem as Laurence

Trevor's suggested fix has no effect on the problem.

I've tried Ian's suggestions on transparency and text, with no effect.

Even deleted all transparent objects and text from the file, saved, and still could not print the file.

Able to print a simple illustrator file (a few boxes with fill and transparencies) without any problem.

FYI, when I click ok, after being told that "illustration can't print", the illustration does print partially.

I get the same message when I try to print to a file.

The file is only 1.2 megs. I'm working in illustrator 10, on Win2000, with 392 megs of ram, about 10 gig of free hard drive space, and printing via usb cable to an HP 500ps w/ hpgl/2 card, and 160mb memory on board.

Help!

[Ian A. Wright]

James:

Create a PDF from that file and see if that will print. Did you toggle bitmapped printing yet?

[Binbin]

I met the same satuation couple days ago when I tried to send a 1 megs AI file to HP DesignJet 1050C plotter(net printer), "can't print illustration" popped up. The contents of this AI file is complicated, the art board size is 60x80in. I did print setup again and repositoned the print area by page tool and saved it, it just worked!
I had 3 familiar files at that time, and I dealt with them in same way. However, the quality of the results was not good, the text on the paper looks like from raster file....:-(
My station:
P4 1.7G, 1024M memory, 20G hard drive(10G free), Illustrator 10.

[James Cleary]

Ian -
I've tried printing with bitmap both on and off - problem persists in both cases. I'm able to save the file as a pdf, but when I go to print it, I get a pop up window that tells me that "the document could not be printed." The file still prints, but only one object from the file prints - the rectangle that is the "backdrop" to all the other elements.

I've been playing around, trying to isolate the problem, and have found that I can print the file, without any error, if I change the paper sizer from ANSI D (24"x36") to ANSI C (18"x24").

I created a brand new, blank, file, set the artboard to equal print setup, and set the page size to ANSI D. I drew single box, with fill, and tried to print. I again get the same "cannot print illustration" message.

Any ideas as to what could be causing this?

[Ian A. Wright]

James:

What printer? What type? Have you checked for new drivers? What O/S and patches? Do you have at least 1 gig of free, clean, de-fragged space for your \WINDOWS\TEMP folder?

Sounds like you're running out of space -- printer RAM and disk spooler.

[James Cleary]

Ian -

Printer: HP550ps 24, w/ hpgl2 card & 160mb memory
Driver: HP DesignJet Printer Driver v5.01
OS: Win 2000, sp3, w/ 320mb ram, 12 gig hard drive (9 gig free). Virtual mem set to 960mb initial size, 1920 available size.

Hard drive was very recently wiped clean and os & software reinstalled, so disk should not be fragmented.

I've tried printing with spooler on and by printing directly to printer. Also, plotter has option to "avoid out of memory", which is on.

I agree that it sounds like a memory issue, but I have a good deal of memory/free space, & the test file with one object shouldn't require an enormous amount of memory, should it? Does printing the blank areas of the artboard consume memory too?

Printing (with paper size set to ANSI C) to a file creates a 680kb file. Printing a file with the same size artboard, with only one rectangle drawn creates a 5kb file.

It doesn't make sense to me that the same file printed to ANSI D paper would be so much larger than the 680kb file that it shouldn't print. Even if it was 100 times larger, it would only be 68 megs. Less than half the size of the printers on board memory.

Let me know what you think.

[James Cleary]

Ian -

One more thing. I'm able to print to ANSI D from photoshop - 4.5 meg file that creates a 73 meg file when print to file is checked. Which makes me suspect that this is an application issue rather than a printer or memory issue.

Jim

[valerie doret]

Just Copy paste your document into a new doc. And print it from there...

[James Cleary]

Valerie -

Tried cutting and pasting to new file, but it didn't work.

I was able to save the file as an eps, open it in photoshop (222 meg file), and print sucessfully, but it would obviously be much easier/quicker to print directly from illustrator.

Jim

[Nicholas Kothari]

Val,

This worked for us. Scale your artwork down to a smaller size and then when you print it, select scaling in the dialogue box. You'll need your calculator for this one. Shrink it 50% and print at 200% for starters. Then 25% shrink and 400% for a last resort. Something about the page size increases the memory it takes to print it. There is some proof to this in the TOP TOPICS area of the Illustrator Support Area under "creating efficient Illustrator files."

The second method is printing with the advanced option of 'From Computer Memory' as opposed to 'From Printer Memory'

Good Luck,
Nicholas K
JPRA Architects Michigan

[James Cleary]

Nocholas -

Your suggestion works, but has a couple of drawbacks.

The file printed successfully, but diagonal lines come out jaggy. Also, Illustrator won't allow me to scale with the "scale line weights and effects" box checked, which doubles the thickness of all the stroke weights in the illustration.

We're already processing the file from the computer memory.

[James Cleary]

Nicholas -

Are you able to print any 'D' size illustrations without the scaling trick?

When I open a new file, draw one line in it, and try to print it as 'D' size, it doesn't work. I'm wondering if others are able to do this. I can understand that printing to larger paper sizes takes more memory, but this seems ridiculous!

Jim

[Ian A. Wright]

James:

Is that HP printer able to print using PostScript? If that's possible, try it on the D-size rectangle.

Another option is to toggle bitmapped printing in the advanced printer options.

Beyond that, I can't help further since I don't have that printer. If you do find an answer, from another User or from Adobe tech support, or whatever, please drop back and let us know. Thanks.