Troubleshooting printing issues with Revit

Autodesk Support

Mar 12, 2025

Products and versions covered

Issue:

How to troubleshoot printing issues with Revit.

Causes:

When troubleshooting a printing issue, there are several factors that could affect the behavior:
  • The model being printed.
    • The specific views being printed.
    • The number of views being printed.
  • The version of Revit.
  • The version of the printer driver.
  • Revit Add-ins that affect printing.
  • The connection between the printer and the workstation (e.g. USB, Parallel, IR, Shared printer, Network attached, etc.).
  • The print settings.
  • The system.
  • The temp folder.

Solution:

Narrow Scope

To better understand the behavior we need to narrow down the scope of the behavior. For consistently reproducible issues, we can do this by going through the following steps:
  • Restart/Update
  1. Restart the system (this ensures that the issue is not specific to the current session of Windows).
  2. Restart the printer (this ensures that a lockup with the printer is not causing the behavior).
  3. Update Revit.
  • Export to PDF
  1. Export to PDF
    1. If the PDF is created successfully, see the following article for troubleshooting an Issue printing to PDF, that is not seen when exporting to PDF
    2. If PDF export fails:
      1. Empty the temp folder (with Revit closed) and then the trash.
      2. Try printing with Raster Processing.
      3. Create a new Revit project (with simple geometry, e.g. a few walls), and test exporting to PDF.
  • Different PDF Reader
    • If the issue only shows up when viewing the PDF output from Revit, test a different PDF reader to see if the behavior is related to the viewer.

A good test for intermittent (as well as reproducible) issues is putting the system into a simplified startup environment. This prevents startup services from taking up resources that may be affecting the print.

Changes in the text (size/position)

If the issue is related to changes in the text (size/position) when printing, the following article has a table of issues associated with this behavior:Issues with text when printing from Revit

More Troubleshooting

If the information above does not lead to a solution, check if any of the following articles apply to your situation:

SymptomsAdditional InfoArticle
Hang when printing to Adobe Acrobat PDF printerSpecify PDF Output directory (Instead of prompting for a filename)Print to PDF may take a long time or fails in Revit
Draw order different onscreen versus printVector ProcessingNested annotation prints incorrectly in vector processing in Revit
Draw order different onscreen versus printVector ProcessingFilled region from nested Revit family missing when printing
Line weights appear different in PDFVector ProcessingLine weights appear inconsistent when printing to PDF with vector in Revit
System crash when printing to PDFApply Windows UpdatesBlue screen when printing to FoxIt PDF in Revit
Cannot select HP printer in RevitUpdate Printer driverRevit plotting problem with HP Designjet
Lines are printing jaggedTurn off depth cueingDiagonal lines appear jagged in pdf and physical printer when printing from Revit
Output is lighter than onscreenTurn off depth cueingView prints lighter than expected in Revit
Printer cannot be used with settings when exporting to NWCYou can ignore warning"Printer cannot be used with print settings..." error when exporting or converting model from Revit to Navisworks
Halftone lines printing blackUncheck "Replace halftone with thin lines"Halftone gray lines print black in Revit
Image from family not printingChange draw layer of imageImage in a Revit family not printing correctly or not printing at all

Products:

Revit Product Family;

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