TomCreation22 Posted March 10, 2007 Share Posted March 10, 2007 Hi there, I have a question regarding exporting to DWG. I posted the question over at the Architosh forums and they suggested I try here, Ive done a search and haven't found any help really. I need to export a VW12.5 Drawing to DWG for printing as I dont have access to a Plotter or Printer that does the A1 size I need. Everytime I try to do this, the viewports all print as they look before theyre updated. With all the lines showing, and as you can imagine, this is completely unacceptable. I need to print them as hidden line, as any normal drawing should be. Are there certain export settings I need to check or is there another way of doing this? Thanks Quote Link to comment
Ray Libby Posted March 10, 2007 Share Posted March 10, 2007 Convert the viewports to lines before export. Quote Link to comment
jan15 Posted March 10, 2007 Share Posted March 10, 2007 ...I need to export a VW12.5 Drawing to DWG for printing as I dont have access to a Plotter or Printer that does the A1 size I need. You need to export to DWG so you can send the file to someone who has a plotter but doesn't have VectorWorks? If that's it, why not instead give them the free VectorWorks Viewer so they can print your MCD file from that? Or print to PDF, and send them the PDF file, which they'll already have software for. ...the viewports all print... I need to print them as hidden line...If you put the viewports in a Class or on a Layer (whichever one is being mapped to Autocad Layers) called "Defpoints", then Autocad won't print them. It automatically makes the Defpoints layer non-print. But it prints anything shown inside the viewport (anything not on Defpoints layer). Quote Link to comment
TomCreation22 Posted March 10, 2007 Author Share Posted March 10, 2007 Thanks How do you convert a veiwport to lines? I will get them to install the VW viewer, thanks. Also, when I convert to PDF, a lot of the lines in the drawing turn grey, is this purely down to the lineweights being too low for the pdf to display properly, or is it something else? Thanks Quote Link to comment
Ray Libby Posted March 10, 2007 Share Posted March 10, 2007 Modify Menu>Convert>Convert to Lines, or Ctrl+Shift+L Quote Link to comment
jan15 Posted March 10, 2007 Share Posted March 10, 2007 ...when I convert to PDF, a lot of the lines in the drawing turn grey... I've never seen that happen. What are you using to print to PDF? I've always used a program called PDF995 (on Windows), and never had the problem you describe. Do those lines print grey? Or just look grey on your monitor with your PDF viewer? Quote Link to comment
Jonathan Pickup Posted March 11, 2007 Share Posted March 11, 2007 exporting to DWG for printing is not the way that I?d do it, I'd use PDF, the results are much better. If you are getting grey lines then use the batch export to PDF and set the colour option to black and white only Quote Link to comment
Petri Posted March 11, 2007 Share Posted March 11, 2007 Many bureaus charge a good deal less for DWG/DXF. Quote Link to comment
Christiaan Posted March 11, 2007 Share Posted March 11, 2007 PDF is definitely the way to go. Are you on mac or windows? How are you creating your PDF? Does your PDF have colour in it, as this can result in greyscale. Quote Link to comment
TomCreation22 Posted March 11, 2007 Author Share Posted March 11, 2007 Thanks for the replies. Im using Mac. Im creating the PDF's by exporting to PDF. Ive figured out, the grey lines are down to the resolution I choose. I started out by automatically going for 300dpi as I assumed this was the normal print resolution, and as I dropped the resolution, I realised this was causing the 'grey' lines. The grey lines are actually black, but they are just too thin to display properly until I zoom right in, but they still print as grey at anything above about 72dpi. What is the optimum resolution for printing to pdf? The balance I found seemed to work was about 60-70dpi. Or am I still missing something? Thanks Quote Link to comment
ErichR Posted March 13, 2007 Share Posted March 13, 2007 Display and printing are, alas two differrent things. Just because it looks gray on a PDF, doesn't mean it will print that way - probably not. PDF is the way to go. Quote Link to comment
JHEarcht Posted March 14, 2007 Share Posted March 14, 2007 The large-format printer used by my print service seems to have only one resolution setting at 400dpi. When I sent them PDFs at 300dpi, the dots were spread out to fit 400dpi, making the lines look grey. My solution was to create the PDFs at 600dpi, the next higher option. Now the dots are compressed down to 400dpi, and the lineweights look correct. It would be nice for PDF to have a 400dpi option, so we wouldn't have to waste those extra 200dpi making the file size unnecessarily large. Quote Link to comment
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