Topic: Uneven printed conductor strokes and dense PE dash-dot pattern

Hello,

I am using QElectroTech 0.100.0 on Windows 11, built and running with Qt 5.15.18, x86_64.

I have two questions about native electrical conductors.

Uneven printed appearance

The conductors have the same Appearance settings: black, Size 0.50, secondary colour disabled. Nevertheless, some lines appear thicker or darker than others in PDF output and on paper.

Export to PDF produces vectors and looks better than printing through a PDF printer, which produces image objects. However, the unequal appearance is not completely eliminated.

The project was generated programmatically from an existing drawing, using native QET elements and conductors. Could overlapping conductor segments, symbol connection strokes or a rendering setting explain this? What would be the best way to distinguish a project problem from a PDF/printer rendering problem?

PE dash-dot spacing

The native dash-dot pattern is too dense at the required thin line width. I need a long dash, clear gap, dot, clear gap, repeated.

Can the dash and gap lengths be adjusted independently of conductor thickness while retaining a real electrical conductor that follows connected elements?

I found the older “Project Scale” discussion, but its Custom dash line suggestion appears to concern graphical shapes.

Is there an existing setting, newer fix or patch for either issue? If independent conductor dash spacing is not supported, should I submit a feature request?

I can provide a reduced .qet example, the exported vector PDF and photographs of the printed result.

Thank you for your help.

  • scorpio810
  • scorpio810
  • QElectroTech Team Manager, Developer, Packager
  • Offline

Re: Uneven printed conductor strokes and dense PE dash-dot pattern

Hi Victor, thanks for the detailed report.

First, 0.100 is quite old. Please try the latest 0.200.1 dev build, since a lot has changed in rendering and export since then.

Uneven strokes: zoom in strongly on the vector PDF. If all conductors have the same width when magnified, the issue is the viewer’s or printer’s thin-line rasterization, not the project. In Acrobat, try disabling “Enhance thin lines”, or compare with another viewer. If some lines stay thicker when magnified, check your generated project for duplicated or overlapping conductors, or conductors drawn over element connection strokes. Two identical antialiased lines on top of each other look darker.

PE dash-dot: Qt’s built-in dash patterns scale with pen width, so a thin line gives a dense pattern. Conductors currently don’t expose independent dash and gap lengths, so yes, please open a feature request on GitHub.

And yes, I’d gladly take your reduced .qet example, the exported PDF and the photos of the printed result. Real-world files like these are very useful for testing code changes. You can attach them here or to the GitHub issue.

Best regards,
Laurent

"Le jour où tu découvres le Libre, tu sais que tu ne pourras jamais plus revenir en arrière..."Questions regarding QET belong in this forum and will NOT be answered via PM! – Les questions concernant QET doivent être posées sur ce forum et ne seront pas traitées par MP !