MicroStation printing problems; we’ve all had them, and they always seem to happen at the most inopportune time. You check and recheck your print settings, your pen table, your design file and all of the attachments. Still, doesn’t print right. Maybe you print to another printer down the hall and it comes out right on that one, but doesn’t have the paper size you need.

If after doing all that and your print isn’t coming out right try toggling on the Rasterized checkbox on the Print dialog then resubmit your print.

Typically when printing from MicroStation your dgn data is converted to a vector meta file format that your printer understands. Once sent to the printer, the printer rasterizes the vector information so it can be printed. Things can go wrong at the printer during this rasterization process on occasion. Some of the more common maladies are curves and/or text don’t get rendered correctly, linestyles are not rendered correctly, or attachments are missing completely.

Toggling on the Rasterized checkbox can fix some of these issues. Turning on this option allows MicroStation to render the data to a single raster image instead of having the printer do the rendering. The raster image generated by MicroStation is sent to the printer, and since it’s already been rasterized the printer doesn’t have to do any of the rendering and just prints what it’s given.

So why not have the Rasterized checkbox toggled on all of the time???  It takes much longer to submit your print from MicroStation.