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Export to Acrobat


graham wilson

Question

We need to email drawings to recipients who do not always have Vectorworks or even a CAD package.

Can anyone advise on the best way to export a Vectorworks file to Adobe Acrobat, such that the line and font quality can be maintained and the pdf file remains scaleable for printing out at the other end?

Many thanks

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We do this all the time. We bind together drawings to have them plotted etc. I will assume that your are doing this on a mac. On windows the steps are similar, but I don't know the specifics.

The first step is to output the postscript. you can do this using Apple's LaserWriter 8 print driver (stanard os 8 and above). When the print dialog comes up there is a pull-down option in the upper right hand corner. You can select printer or file. (You can also create a postscript translator desktop printer with Apple's Desktop Printer Utility that will only print to a file.)

When you select "file" the output will be postscript and will, by default, save a file named *.ps. This postscript file can now be translated into a .pdf (Adobe Acrobat) file.

A note on fonts: In the laserwriter 8 print dialog there is a pulldown with various settings (top is "General"). One of those options is "Save as File." In this option panel you will see an option for font inclusion. It defaults to "none." Change this to "all" or "all but standard 13" if you want to have your own postscipt fonts embedded.

The translating.... with OSX on the horizon you will be able to skip most of these steps. Since OSX uses pdf as the grahics layer, you will be able to natively create pdf files of anything that you can render to the screen. But for now we have three choices. We do this quite a bit so we bought Adobe Acrobat. You use a companion program called Distiller to actually create pdf files from ps files. Acrobat is worth it if you will want to bind individual pdfs into a set or set security so that viewers can't print or change the file. If you don't want the drop the $ on Acrobat there is a unix postscript viewer called ghostview. Some guy ported some of it to the mac and not surprisingly it is called MacGhostView. In this package (look on www.versiontracker.com for the download link) there are two apps. One is called macps2pdf. Drag and drop your *.ps file on this to get a *.pdf file. It works pretty well.

There is also a program called Print2PDF that you can find a link on versiontracker for . It is pretty popular but I haven't tried it. It is a printer driver that you can choose (via the chooser). It skips the postscript generation process. Abobe also has a printer driver option. I would stay away from that implementation.

I have just touched on the basics. If you have any more questions or if there is anymore interest I could write more later.

Windows is similar. To generate the postscript on windows 95/98 you can download adobe's ps printer driver and save to a file. I don't know the application options for windows but there must be some.

Another note... how to get big page sizes... you can download a ppd file from vendors such as hp and use that file for your desktop printer. That will allow you to generate d or e size sheets that you wouldn't be able to do with the default printer profile.

Hope this helps.

Austin Sloat, AIA

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Some additional Information:

We are on Mac's in our office, and we have found that if you buy the full version of Acrobat, and download the free Adobe PS 8.7 driver from Adobe's website, when the Adobe driver is selected in the Chooser you can create PDF's directly from VectorWorks without the extra step of creating a PS file first.

If you have both Adobe products installed, and you print directly from VectorWorks, the Adobe print dialog lets you select the Distiller directly from the virtual printer pull down menu, and when you "save as file", you will save the PDF directly.

Also, the Adobe 8.7 driver allows you to save custom page sizes of any dimension, where as the LaserWriter driver only allows you to save those page sizes supported by your laser printer (or some other PPD).

The above process produces excellent quality PDF,s on a Mac, and I would think the Windows driver would be similar.

You can download the Adobe 8.7.1 driver for Mac directly from:

ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/printerdrivers/mac/8.x/US.sea.hqx

I think the Windows driver has a different version number, 5.x or something. You can find it by going to the follownig link and scrolling down to "Printer Drivers":

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/main.html

Hope this helps,

PeterT

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quote:

Originally posted by graham wilson:

Thanks for that- as it happens we are on PC's, but we have now bought the full version of Acrobat and printing direct to the PDFwriter driver is very straightforward on PC's as well.

Just to clarify, Acrobat comes with both the "PDFwriter" and the "Distiller". According to Adobe, the PDFwriter is sort of a short cut, and should be used primarily for text documents. If you try to process the complexities of a graphic document, you may experience some problems, the main one, in my experience, is that rotated text is handled poorly.

For flawless PDFs, use the Distiller as described previously instead. It takes a little longer creating the file, but the results are always perfect.

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Acrobat is great and has solved some interesting problems for us, but.... if I import a high resolution image into VW; when I create the pdf file (with the page setup set to high resolution) VW gives Acrobat a low resotion image for the pdf file. It's fine for screen proofing but looks horrible for print. Everything else is great. It is only the images that are a problem. Can anybody help me?

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