New CB printing madness

[Oldtimer]

Look, am I angry about it? yes, and i have access to Acrobat so printing to PDF is not a problem,

But the truth of the matter is there is nothing that can be done about it now, this is a limitation of Silverlight, and WOTC had to use Silverlight to leverage there .NET code they created for the first builder, so basically we're still stuck with a 3 year old stupid decision.

Nothing we say now can fix that.

Well, I don't think the 3 year old decision was stupid in itself. There was nothing wrong with building the original CB in .NET/WPF. What made it a stupid decision was creating a new CB in Silverlight instead of supporting and updating the current version. I think Silverlight is cool, but it wasn't the right tool for this job.

 

[Lokiare]

Well, I don't think the 3 year old decision was stupid in itself. There was nothing wrong with building the original CB in .NET/WPF. What made it a stupid decision was creating a new CB in Silverlight instead of supporting and updating the current version. I think Silverlight is cool, but it wasn't the right tool for this job.

I agree. From some experimentation from the WotC boards, people have found that they pretty much just took the CB engine and put it behind the server wall. So all the previous functionality from the CBC is still there, (along with all the bugs) but its their silverlight app that limits everyone...

 

[DarkLord Of DForce]

Hey everyone.

Just wanted to drop a note and let everyone know we did finally get the problem resolved.

Spooling did not work. We tried that first, and it made nary a difference - still printed out the
first 2 pages, stopped somewhere on the third, then blank pages after that.

CutePDF works great. We D/Led it, installed it, and started using it for all our CB printing needs. The files are *much* smaller, seem to have as good as or better quality, and now we can carry our characters around in a file format again.

Thanks to everyone who replied!

 

[tuxgeo]

I want to add my voice to the chorus of thanks to those who suggested using the CutePDF application for printing.
I finally tried to create a Level 1 Wizard (not "Mage (Wizard")) online, and it only took me the better part of an hour to do so; but that involved reading lots of text about the various powers available.
When it came time to print, I tried to print with CutePDF designated as the destination printer; and a file was created, but the act of doing so crashed the Silverlight client. I had to reload. Unfortunately, only the first three pages of the 5-page (!) character sheet were included in the resulting file.

Overall, I must have crashed the local Silverlight client five or six times before I figured out an approach that worked: print the CS to CutePDF, but specify which single page (1 of 5, or 2 of 5, etc.) to "print out" to a file.
Even then, it got confused; I had a separate .pdf file for page 1, page 3, page 4, and page 5, but when I tried to print page 2, it gave me the content of page 3 again.
I found a workaround: exit the "Character Sheet" part of the application, go back to the "Character Builder" part; and then reload the CS part again. That made printing "page 2" actually give me the content of page 2.

Each resulting one-page .pdf file was 128 MB of data. I keep thinking that there simply has to be a smaller graphic format than bitmap.

Edit: The download dialog kept telling that each one-page print job was xxMB of 128MB spooled; but when I looked at the actual files that had been saved, they were each smaller than 2MB. (Somebody can't count right.)

That's what I get for trusting the download dialog to give me an accurate description of how big the resulting files are going to be.

 

[Peraion Graufalke]

Each resulting one-page .pdf file was 128 MB of data. I keep thinking that there simply has to be a smaller graphic format than bitmap.

You can further reduce the pdf file size by changing the dpi to 144 in the printer settings. This will also speed up the printing process.

 

[sigfile]

Each resulting one-page .pdf file was 128 MB of data. I keep thinking that there simply has to be a smaller graphic format than bitmap.

You can try different PDF printers. The default Adobe printer that comes with Acrobat (standard) generates sharp, small files. If you're focusing on free options, PrimoPDF also generates small files, but I'm not pleased with the image quality (although there's probably some setting I could tweak to fix that). Bullzip's resulting file comes to about 1.5 MB per page, but the image is nice and sharp.

Short version - if you don't have Adobe (standard), try Bullzip.

 

[tuxgeo]

You can try different PDF printers. The default Adobe printer that comes with Acrobat (standard) generates sharp, small files. If you're focusing on free options, PrimoPDF also generates small files, but I'm not pleased with the image quality (although there's probably some setting I could tweak to fix that). Bullzip's resulting file comes to about 1.5 MB per page, but the image is nice and sharp.

Short version - if you don't have Adobe (standard), try Bullzip.

Thanks for the link to Bullzip. I'll have to give that a try.

Alas, I must spread XP around before giving it to sigfile again. [Bibble.]

 

[Cyberknight]

Are you printing to large printer, like a laser printer? The only people that will most likely have a problem printing are those trying to from to home desktop type printers, like ink jets. The issue is that the files that are being sent to the printer are to large for the printer to handle.

While I have many issues with the new builder, printing is not one of them. I am using an HP Laserjet M1319F that I picked up for $150 last year.

I printed a first level character just to see what the spool looked like. A 5 page character spooled up to 20.5 MB and only took a few seconds to start printing. I also tried just printing page 3 and it printed the correct page.

Maybe Microsoft has a hidden agenda to promote laser printers with Silverlight

 

[MrMyth]

I am not sure that this is the fault of WotC in this case. Apparently, printing in Silverlight results in Bitmap files.

Making printing easier in Silverlight 4 | davidpoll.com
Silverlight 4 Printing Feature : The Official Microsoft Silverlight Site

Sorry Mudbunny, but that still makes it WotC's fault. They chose to use Silverlight, either knowing this was an issue with the software or not having done enough research regarding something (printing) that was a core concern of their application.

This actually makes me feel much worse about this bug. If this was just a coding screw-up on their end... well, it happens, and that is something they an fix. If it truly is a built-in part of Silverlight and there is no way around it? That is incredibily disappointing. My assumption thus far is that the CB is a crappy product now, but will be something useful in 6 months. Suddenly, thanks to this assurance, I'm no longer so sure...