Thin faint lines appear between identical fills on macOS

Daniel Kovacs
Graphisoft Alumni
Graphisoft Alumni
If you are working with ARCHICAD on macOS you might have faced the issue that sometimes between identical fills (or even inside a fill) you can see thin lines, either with the color of the background, or a darker shade of the solid fills' color (as seen in the images below). This is mainly because of the way macOS applies Anti-Aliasing on the edges of these fills. Let's see the most common areas you can meet this problem, one by one.

Thin grid lines appear on semi-transparent fills and selection highlights inside ARCHICAD

Affected versions: ARCHICAD 21 or older on all macOS versions | Severity: on-screen display issue only | ID: 173922
 
Issue
 
As you can see in the pictures below, a thin (1 pixel wide) gridline may appear inside semi-transparent solid fills (eg. 50% fill), and in selection highlights.
wp-content_uploads_2018_01_Grid-on-50-percent-fill-2-300x300.png
wp-content_uploads_2018_01_Fine-grid-on-selection-highlight-1-300x300.png
Cause Solid fills are made up of smaller chunks of solid fills when they are displayed on the screen. When macOS tries to patch them together, there will be a small overlap between the fills. Selection Highlights are basically semi-transparent solid fills, so the same thing happens to those as well. This is just an on-screen display issue, in published drawings/PDFs this should not be present. Solution This issue was fixed in ARCHICAD 22.

Thin separator lines appear between identical fills inside ARCHICAD

Affected versions: ARCHICAD 21 or older on all macOS versions | Severity: on-screen display issue only | ID: 173922 Issue When you place identical fills next to each other, or you look at a faced where multiple walls with the same surface seamlessly mend together, you might be able to see a thin faint white line where the fills meet.
wp-content_uploads_2018_01_Thin-line-between-identical-fills-1-300x270.png
wp-content_uploads_2018_01_Thin-line-between-identical-fills-elevation-294x300.png
Cause and Workaround According to the 3D model and the Vectorial content these fills meet in the exact same position, and thus the connection should be seamless. But when the edges of these fills are Anti-Aliased by macOS, they are mended with the background's white, not the neighbouring fill, so a little white colour is blended into both edges, resulting in a thin white line. This can actually be circumvented by turning 2D Anti-Aliasing off in the Work Environment (under Advanced Redraw Options). This might result in somewhat jittery lines in 2D Views, but with Retina displays (or High Resolution 4K/5K displays) it makes little to no difference, so we suggest turning it off anyways. Solution This issue was fixed in ARCHICAD 22.

Thin separator lines appear between identical fills on Published PDFs

Affected versions: ARCHICAD on all macOS versions | Severity: on-screen display issue only | ID: 146603
 
Issue
 
On published PDFs between the edges where fills meet you may see a thin white line (as in the previous case, only on published PDFs). If you take this PDF for instance, this is how it would look on macOS (in Preview), and Windows (in Adobe Reader):
wp-content_uploads_2018_01_on-macOS-1-300x256.png
wp-content_uploads_2018_01_on-W10-1-300x256.png
Cause This is basically the same issue as in the previous case. As macOS's Anti-Alias gets applied to the edges of the fills, a little background colour will be blended into them, resulting into visible edges. This is just a display issue as well, the connection of the fills is precise, so if the AA is turned off in the Viewer (the option to turn this off is no longer available in Preview and Adobe Reader), or the page is printed, this shouldn't be an issue. This can also happen on Windows 10 in some rare cases, but switching to a different application can solve the problem usually.

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