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Bricscad Issues - Incomplete Output When Printing To CUPS-PDF
2012-06-07
2012-06-14: SOLVED: This problem went away after I uninstalled, removed all dependencies, upgraded, and replaced everything. This is assumed to have been a temporary bad setup of my system, possibly due to having installed Bricscad the "multiarch way".
2012-06-13 UPDATE: Bricscad cannot reproduce this problem, but I am still having it. I did a lot of testing today and think it has at least something to do with the complexity of the drawing.
This one is weird, and would not be tolerable for anybody. It might not be a Bricscad problem, but as far as I can tell it only happens in Bricscad.
Problem Description
I create a drawing, and a page layout. Then I print that page layout using my CUPS-PDF virtual printer as the print device. I save the PDF as normal. I'm expecting to see a full PDF version of my drawing. Instead, I get output that is incomplete.
By examining the output, you can tell that Bricscad output the elements of the drawing in order, from the lowest layers in the stack to the highest. At some point in this process, it aborts the output and closes off the PDF.
What's weird is that it doesn't die in the same place every time. If I print the drawing ten times, I get a different incomplete PDF each time! Sometimes the output stops very early, and every once in a while I get the complete drawing.
Example Output
I made a simple test drawing containing a block of text, because that shows the error really well. The text is output in order until something happens, and output is ended mid-sentence. Here is the original drawing:
I printed that drawing ten times, using a CUPS-PDF virtual printer. Each time the PDF came out different. Here are all ten attempts collated into one PDF:
The sixth attempt, page six of the PDF, contains the complete document.
If you don't feel like viewing the PDF, these thumbnail images will give you an idea of the problem.
Hypothesis
My guess is that Bricscad is encountering some error in the PDF creation process. The PDF creation is halted, but no error message is reported.
I tried running Bricscad from a terminal, to see if anything interesting was printed to STDOUT or STDERR when this thing happens. No error message was reported, only "lpr: Success".
Next Step
How do you make Bricscad output verbose debugging information?