Print quality problems on Fuji Xerox printers when printing from ArchiCAD and/or Preview.

Question

Hello,
We experience major print quality problems when printing directly from Graphisoft's ArchiCAD, Nemetscheks Vectorworks and from Apple's Preview.
Basically we see various artefacts on our printed drawings, e.g. line thicknesses change and hatched patterns / fills are reproduced with patches where the lineweights and clours change completely... which is not acceptable.
This affects the following Fuji Xerox printer models on both 10.6.x and 10.7.x with the latest FJX PPDs:
ApeosPort C5540I
Xerox LF6605 MF
The workarounds for us are to either print PDFs from Adobe Acrobat Reader or via the rather dated Accxess Tools, besides that we prefer at times to print directly from a given Software it is also not always possible to generate a PDF and print it from Acrobat Reader... especially since the latest Adobe Reader update to its print dialogue makes printing from it extremely tedious - in fact we are considering going back to 9.5.2
Obviously, we have approached FJX Tech Support and are awaiting a reply - however we are disappointed that this is happening on relatively new equipment and wonder if anybody else has already found a solution.

Answer 1

The symptoms you mention could be related to the FJX engine and Acrobat is masking this fault. To test, you can create a Postscript file from the print dialog of ArchiCAD or VectorWorks and then download this to the Apeos RIP. If this produces the same result as when using the printer driver from the applications, then it would indicate that the engine is not capable of handling the data being sent to it from these applications.