Old map (saved as pdf) crashes PC when attempt to print
Dear all,
ages ago I created a map with campaign cartographer. I saved it as a pdf file (~ 22 MB).
Recently I found it on an old hard drive and since this maps contains a lot of memories from our ten years lasting DnD campaign, I would like to print it again.
When I open the PDF file the map builds up in the order I have built it back then. That takes about two minutes before its done and looks pretty cool.
Printing it with from PDF reader seems impossible. The reader crashes on all PCs I have tried so far (no matter which printer I use, or "print as pdf").
When I open the file in Google Chrome it identifies it as a fcw-file and has the same "build up effect". But same here: the tab in Chrome crashes when I try print it.
So I downloaded the demo version of campaign cartographer, but that crashes immediately when I try to open the pdf.
Has anyone ever had a similar issue? Any tipps apreciated!
Comments
Campaign Cartographer does not open pdf files, only FCW files (CC3's own format). You don't happen the original FCW file lying around somewhere?
Sadly not.
I tried that because when I open the pdf in chrome the file name reads "*.fcw". I also tried and bluntly changed the file extension from pdf to fcw, but that worked neither (surprise).
Yeah, it's just a note of the file type the pdf was printed from. Do you have Photoshop available? I'd try opening the map within that to see whether it can recover it.
If you have access to Acrobat Professional, it may also be worth trying to feed it through the PDF optimizer, flatten the structure of the file.
Those old PDF's are pretty cool, because they contain actual vector data from CC3+, making them have the same "infinite" zoom capability that the original CC2 map it was made from. But unfortunately, that also means it is highly complex, which is why it probably crashes your readers now.
Ah! I just signed up for the test version to try and convert it to a jpg. That did not work "no graphics found in pdf".
But I will try and figure out how to flatten it! It's like "embedding" I guess.
Very intresting for a layman to hear what you say about "those old PDFs"! Explains the "build up" effect.
I'll let you know if any of that worked for me! Thank you so much for your support!
WOOAAHH! About 20 hours after Acrobat Reader crashed my printer suddenly comes to life! As it looks it's printing two "lines" every five minutes now!
Too sad that it hasn't had my good paper that I planned for it but just a plain white sheet.
I'll try all your suggestions anyway!
If it crashed before finishing the print job, you may end up with an unfinished print unfortunately.
If that doesn't end up working for you, one way to print it as long as you can display it on screen is to just capture the screen (PrtScn) and print the captured image. For a better quality version, zoom into the pdf and take multiple captures (make sure to just scroll, but keep the same zoom level) and glue them together in an image editor, and then print that.
Yep - it just printed a quater of the map. Your were right.
Now some buddy (who is using a mac) helped me and made a proper 900 dpi PNG file of the PDF. I am happy with that so far. But I will keep my jumbo-PDF anyway. =)
Thank you everyone for the great and FAST support! What a community! You're awesome!
There's a trick I learned a long time ago on troublesome PDFs that won't print. If you bring up the Print window, somewhere there will be an option to "Print As Image." In the current version of Reader, it's on the Advanced tab. No guarantees, but that has often gotten files with a lot of vectored objects (which is what you have, if it "builds up in the order . . .") to print without errors.
I have Sumtra pdf reader. It lets me copy an image in a pdf. I can then paste that into Irfanview, and save that as a bmp, jpg, or png. Then import into CC3+, and make a map.