New CB printing madness

[Mithreinmaethor]

I would install CutePDF and then change its settings to 144 DPI instead of 600 DPI. This will create manageable sized pdf's for your characters.

 

[mudbunny]

Mudbunny, this is not a personal attack on you, but that is exactly the type of attitude that concerns me, and hope WotC proper does not share it.

Wizards selected Silverlight as the platform for their product, and very well better have known how the customer would interface it, and what environments they were likely to be opperating in.

See my post above. The CB is central enough to the WotC strategy that they should have done a much better job in requirements definition, development, QA, and overall project management. The fact is they have not - and that is troublesome. They have significant repairing to do.

I wasn't saying that WotC should be let off the hook. However, I have been seeing a lot of threads like this on the WotC boards quickly go from this to "WotC can't code!!" That is all that I was attempting to head off. Nothing else. WotC chose the Silverlight platform for the Character builder, and must accept the consequences of that decision, including ridiculous print spool sizes.

I doubt that *any* platform picked would have been a perfect choice, with all positives and no downside. WotC chose SL, *knowing* that this was one of the downsides. Obviously, in their view, the positives of SL outweighed the negatives.

 

[Lord Ernie]

I would install CutePDF and then change its settings to 144 DPI instead of 600 DPI. This will create manageable sized pdf's for your characters.

This, although I'd not go below 300 DPI, myself. I did try 144, but some of the text on the power cards became very hard to read. Using a PDF printer will bring in image compression, leaving you with a PDF file of a couple of megabytes, which most printers should be able to handle.

Also, despite this being a Silverlight issue and thus not really their fault, they really should have tested for this. My level 12 character resulted in a 900 megabyte download last time I tried to print it; now, I have a reasonably large monthly limit (200 gigabytes), but I can imagine there's people out there - especially in some European countries - for whom that could cause problems.

 

[mudbunny]

This, although I'd not go below 300 DPI, myself. I did try 144, but some of the text on the power cards became very hard to read. Using a PDF printer will bring in image compression, leaving you with a PDF file of a couple of megabytes, which most printers should be able to handle.

Also, despite this being a Silverlight issue and thus not really their fault, they really should have tested for this. My level 12 character resulted in a 900 megabyte download last time I tried to print it; now, I have a reasonably large monthly limit (200 gigabytes), but I can imagine there's people out there - especially in some European countries - for whom that could cause problems.

This isn't downloaded. It is created on by the SL client on your computer.

 

[Piratecat]

I would install CutePDF and then change its settings to 144 DPI instead of 600 DPI. This will create manageable sized pdf's for your characters.

It's still brutal.

PDF from the old CB: 400K
PDF from the new CB: 5.8 MB

Frankly, that's ridiculous and unacceptable. And I'm a guy who loves me the WotC.

 

[Vael]

I'm having trouble printing at all. Printing to PDF just crashes the app, or at least times it out long enough for Chrome to ask questions. And I'm seriously downloading 600+ mb just to print? My service provider has a limit, and I'd rather not have to deal with such file sizes.

 

[Mithreinmaethor]

I'm having trouble printing at all. Printing to PDF just crashes the app, or at least times it out long enough for Chrome to ask questions. And I'm seriously downloading 600+ mb just to print? My service provider has a limit, and I'd rather not have to deal with such file sizes.

CutePDF is a very small file to download and install.

 

[Piratecat]

CutePDF is a very small file to download and install.

It's a great workaround. It's no substitute for correctly implemented printing, though.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go rage at the tide for a bit.

 

[occam]

Just another data point: With the old CB, running Cute PDF on a Windows VM, PDFs were about 300 KB. Printing to PDF from the new CB on a Mac, PDFs are 10 MB, around 30x the size. I haven't had any major issues with the new CB so far, but this is obnoxious.

 

[Peraion Graufalke]

Apparently, printing in Silverlight results in Bitmap files.

Lolwhat?
*headdesk*

Now that explains a lot.