Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 elfninja Nov 16, 2010 18:03:54	I have bullzip printer installed, and i commonly use it to print my character sheets because if i try to print direct to the real printer from the old character builder the difference in paper dimensions between US and UK means the skills and the rest of the left hand side are missing off each page. So i thought i would try printing with the new CB, and when i print to bullzip (which makes a pdf if you are not familiar with this software) all i get are blank pages. IT doesnt matter if i am using the essentials char sheet format or the classic one. So is this deliberate? Do they not want us to print our character sheets, and if not why is there even a print button. Printing from a pdf allows us to make sure the paper size is set correctly for our country, so its a good thing.
#2 Dane_McArdy Nov 16, 2010 18:49:11	I have bullzip printer installed, and i commonly use it to print my character sheets because if i try to print direct to the real printer from the old character builder the difference in paper dimensions between US and UK means the skills and the rest of the left hand side are missing off each page. So i thought i would try printing with the new CB, and when i print to bullzip (which makes a pdf if you are not familiar with this software) all i get are blank pages. IT doesnt matter if i am using the essentials char sheet format or the classic one. So is this deliberate? Do they not want us to print our character sheets, and if not why is there even a print button. Printing from a pdf allows us to make sure the paper size is set correctly for our country, so its a good thing. It printed using acrobat pro, but of course, who is going to buy an exspensive program just for printing PDFs from the CB. Which, btw, are not editable PDFs, they are just images of text, not actual text. And low rez. And look like crap.
#3 grahamwills Nov 17, 2010 0:33:04	It's not just size that is the issue; it means that on a screen, such as my ipad, they scale very poorly and slow the whole system down. It is the major issue I have -- when I look at PDFs they now look ugly and are very slow. Since the whole point is the character sheet, this is a major failing. I have acrobat pro, tried a few things and basically it fails every time. It just needs real PDFs with text, otherwise the quality will stink.
#4 pauln6 Nov 17, 2010 4:01:05	I use a pdf converter - are you saying I wont be able to print to pdf?  Jesus I really wanted to like this online builder but I'm struggling to come up with a reason at this rate.  They need to sort this stuff out quickly.
#5 crayne Nov 17, 2010 4:37:40	I haven't tried with bullzip yet, but Nuance PDF Create works fine (but costs 50€).
#6 evilref Nov 17, 2010 5:00:22	I got some 600dpi pdfs to come out of it using pdfcreator. That said there's some annoying bleed around the text which is visable when I print on my laser. It's not coming through on the inkjet though. Overall it's not terrible, but is irritating.
#7 Bomberg Nov 17, 2010 5:43:27	FreePDF as printer driver generates very big files with blurry images of the text. CB doesn't seem to spool text to the printer but send just an image. Yikes!  Disappointed Baron von Bomberg
#8 thespaceinvader Nov 17, 2010 5:58:03	I've had no problems using the latest BullZip PDF printer which I obtained less than a month ago.  Well, other than the staggering spool file size and PDFs an order of magnitude larger than those made by the old CB. COuldn't suggest a fix though, sadly.
#9 Dane_McArdy Nov 17, 2010 7:07:04	I've had no problems using the latest BullZip PDF printer which I obtained less than a month ago.  Well, other than the staggering spool file size and PDFs an order of magnitude larger than those made by the old CB. COuldn't suggest a fix though, sadly. The fix needs to be on Wizards end. Clearly a PDF is being generated on their end, and then that PDF is being turned into some sort of image, like a jpeg, or png or whatever, and that's what you see. And so when you print out as a PDF, there is no text.
#10 blastphemy Nov 17, 2010 13:20:12	On my MacPro with Acrobat Professional 9, CB creates 15mb .pdf character sheets. But on my Gateway Windows 7 machine with Acrobat Pro 9, CB creates the same sheet at 1mb. Part of the reason is that Snow Leopard completely ruined Adobe Acrobat on the Mac platform. The files are bloated, poorly-rendered, and have lost some core functionality. Acrobat on the Mac since Snow Leopard was released is an abomination and utter joke. Regardless of platform, though, I agree that it's completely unacceptable for WOTC to render images instead of text-based sheets that convert more effeciently to .pdf, as their previous CB program did.
#11 guest742363515 Nov 18, 2010 1:54:29	CutePDF works as a free print to PDF option. It looks like it wants about 150mb per page to spool the images of the pages. The min page count is 4 so you will need to wait for it to spool about 650mb each time you try to print a copy. Printing several pages per page does not help any btw. I normally print 2 pages per sheet but it still wanted 1gb to spool my 11th monk. It broke up each of the Full diciplines into a standard attack power card and a move power card.
#12 tibis Nov 18, 2010 11:52:58	Clearly a PDF is being generated on their end, and then that PDF is being turned into some sort of image, like a jpeg, or png or whatever, and that's what you see. And so when you print out as a PDF, there is no text. I don't believe any rendering is happening serverside.  I am fairly sure that the character builder app is locally rendering each page as an image, which happens to end up as an uncompressed bitmap in the spool.  That data then undergoes one or more conversion steps for the target. Looking at an XPS file created by printing to the Microsoft XPS Document Writer, each page is a single 600dpi image