Aliased lines in Silverlight printout

[JollyJacob]

Hi,

We are having a major problem with our Silverlight (ArcGIS 10) application where the polylines shown on the map are being aliased (not clean straight lines). The printout of this map also retains the distortion. The current desktop solution that the client is using resolves this problem by using an ArcMap object to print. How does one get ArcMap quality printout from the web Silverlight application?

Thanks
Jolly

[dotMorten_esri]

The lines you are printing, are these in a dynamic or tiled service, or are they residing in a GraphicsLayer? Silverlight should print at roughly 300dpi which would make the lines smooth, provided they are rendered clientside (which is not the case if it's not a GraphicsLayer).

If you require ArcMap quality printouts you need ArcMap, or expose a print task through ArcGIS Server. Silverlight is at this point not geared for making that type of prints as it stands today (Silverlight 5 will improve greatly on that but I doubt it will ever get to a level that a full-blown tailored native mapping application can be).

That is also why Server v10.1 will include a print task to help you with this.

[JollyJacob]

Thanks for your response, Morten.

The map service is dynamic, and they are not residing in a GraphicsLayer. Could you please elaborate on how one exposes a print task through ArcGIS Server. Isn't that what is already being done? Is there a way, in which we can, through our Silverlight web application, call ArcMap objects to do the print task? The acceptance of our whole Silverlight application now depends on this, because these printouts are considered to be engineering drawings and therefore require high quality printouts.

Regards

[vamsibande]

HI,

Writing this to be helpful for others who would like to know or come across the same problem.

After trying each and evry solution we weren't able to produce smooth lines using the normal dynamic layer print,the only way to get this is to replace your dynamic layer with your graphics layer which would render on the client side and will give you smoothe lines on printing it.


It will be a lot of map rendering and for replacing the whole layer with the graphics layer print. Best thing to do is to change the layers just before print and then give the print command.

Hope this helps. and sorry for not responding quickly enough.

[dotMorten_esri]

What image format do you use as output for that service? If you use PNG8, there might not be enough colors (or alpha values) available in the exported image to create nice looking smooth lines. Try with png32 as your output.