OSX, VW and pdf's

[Donald Wardlaw]

Preface:

I love the way 9.5 works in OSX. It is I think a highwater mark for the program, despite ongoing opportunities for improvement.

The latest version of Adobe Acrobat (5.05) works in OSX except for one, ahem, detail---It can't create Adobe Acrobat files.

You can create pdfs in any application by saving to a pdf file. But you don't need acrobat to do this, and Acrobat is in fact not doing it. This is Apple's implementation of generic pdf not Adobe's proprietary form, and I find the quality to be problematic, especially in VW. Also there are no custom page sizes, so good luck creating a 24x36 pdf.

Problem:

I've lost the ability to easily make high quality, full sized pdfs. What a mess. If I use the built in pdf capability in OSX I get weird results, text drawn out and strewn about. (I don't have this problem with other applications like Microsoft Office X). I also recently learned that faxSTF (don't get me started) makes a mess of my VW files (because I think they are based on Quartz pdf's) so I cannot fax from VW anymore either.

Soooo....

Anyone find away around this dilema using OSX and VW9.5?

Regards,Donald

[aersloat]

I haven't had any trouble at all with creating PDF files from 9.5 in OSX. In fact I just created one to verify that there weren't any problems going to an Arch D size. There are two ways to create a PDF file directly.

But first, let's talk about sheet size. We have an HP 1055cm large format printer. This printer has a PPD file which describes page sizes up to Arch E. If you don't have a large format postscript printer just follow this procedure. First, download the drivers for this printer from hp's site or versiontracker (search for "HP") Or here is the link for the lazy: http://www.versiontracker.com/redir.fcgi/kind=1&db=mac&id=11199/ install the software so you get the PPDs. (PPD stands for postscript printer definition, BTW, and describes things like available page sizes, etc. The actual files are just text can be opened with TextEdit and edited; however, this is generally not advised)

Now, go to Print Center and create a new LPR printer ("Add Printer"). This will be a dummy printer. Put a bogus local ip address in -- like 192.168.0.5 and under the "printer model" pull it down and select the 1055cm PPD. If it isn't listed in the pulldown menu just select "other" and go an find it on your hard drive. You can also fake it out with the old OS 9 version. Anyway, create the printer.

Go to page setup in VW9.5 and tell it to use this bogus printer. Under Format For... select your bogus printer and then all your available oversize sheets will be available. Voila.

As far as actually creating the PDF file there are a few options. The option I have found most useful has been to click the "preview" button in the print dialog. This opens the Preview app with your sheet displayed. From there you can "Save as PDF" (or TIFF) from the file menu. There are two other ways. You can, of course, click on save as PDF in the "Output Options" tab of the print dialog. This isn't necessarily as reliable as the last method. The last option is to save the print job as raw postscript. This .ps file can then be ripped into a PDf file by MacGhostView or PStill (look on www.versiontracker.com) on OSX or brought in to Classic and ripped via the still-not-carbonized Acrobat Distiller. You can use Acrobat 5.0.5 Carbon (full version, not reader) to bind up multiple sheets.

Your mileage will vary with MacGhostView and PStill. You should also watch your fonts as I have found that fonts do not always get properly embedded. We use Tekton (postscript) and that has worked okay. For maximum portability use a font that you know the person or service bureau on the receiving end has a copy of.

As far as lines being wacky, etc. I don't know what to say except that we haven't had that kind of problem. Try to make the PDF file with a few of the various methods and see if your results vary. BTW, this is assuming you have all of your OSX system software up-to-date.

Hope this helps

[Donald Wardlaw]

Holy cow, Austin. What a great post! I was thinking of trying to get a printer driver to get the larger page size.

I appreciate your time and detailed comment. I'll see if it works for me.

Best,

Donald

[aersloat]

No Problem. Let me know if this works for you. If not, I will post a more detailed tutorial with some screen shots.

I think that the most important feature in OSX for our industry is its ability to natively produce PDFs from ANY application. We have bound up sets of drawings and specs in PDF format for years-- but it was a fairly involved process (though not difficult). We also archive drawing sets internally on CD-ROM in PDF format.

PDFs are great ways to exchange drawings with contractors and clients and work very well with service bureaus too.

[Donald Wardlaw]

Austin,

The short answer is SUCCESS.

I had no problem downloading the driver and installing it. That was cool.

I found that the pdf's generated by Quartz using preview were not so hot. They exagerate the line weight of angled lines.

When I tried to print to a pdf file, I always got a print error. It seemed to process the file, then it would get hung up trying to find the printer which doesn't exist. Never did find the files it was supposed to be making.

But the wonderful thing was printing to a .ps file. It did not work well at first. Then I decided that distiller should have more than the default memory, and I found I could not really set that while booted in X, so I rebooted in 9, set the memory, then rebooted in X. At this point I was getting good quality files, but only a part of the drawing. Then (and I've never nosed around distiller before) I found that I had to set the default page size to the drawing size and save that as a setting. Voila!

I now get beautiful, Adobe pdfs like before.

I am grateful for your help. You are a credit to our profession!

Best,

Donald

[GJ]

This is great information...

However, I do hope that Apple and VW work on this to make it simpler. (just being able to set your paper size manually without having a printer driver would be handy.)

I agree pdfs are a very handy feature, it's just too bad that OSX and 9.5 had to complicate things.

GJ

[mikeconner]

Have any of you using Distiller to create PDFs run into the problem of Distiller not being able to see the PS file because it has no type code? When I go to open a ps file in Distiller, it won't list files created from OS X apps until I use a utility to assign a TEXT type code. Do other people have this happen or am I just lucky?

[Donald Wardlaw]

,,Have any of you using Distiller to create PDFs run into the problem of Distiller not being able to see the PS file because it has no type code? When I go to open a ps file in Distiller, it won't list files created from OS X apps until I use a utility to assign a TEXT type code. Do other people have this happen or am I just lucky? ..

Er, sort of. But you can fool it.Save the .ps file to the desktop.Launch distiller. Once you see the ready dialogue...Drag the .ps file (on the OSX desktop) onto thethe distiller window where the job is normally listed (in the classic environment). It will belch, and then proceed to process the job.

Hope I described that well enough, it was from memory. I do it and it works.

Donald

[UserName]

Well, just a quick thanks for some very useful tips.I've just applied the "Austin Method" for sending an A1 size PDF to the print bureau. Success!, .........almost.

Everything translated fine except for the text in a view marker which was missing. The "rotated text" box was checked in the VW print options. Any ideas?

OS 10.1.2, VW9.5, thanks,Nicholas.

[aersloat]

Was the text visible in the pdf or was it missing only in the hard copy? Was it a postscript font? Have you tried to substitute another font in its place with the same results? Nothing jumps out at me and I can't recall seeing anything like that.

[UserName]

Hi Austin,The text was visible in the PDF (viewed with acrobat reader5) but not in hard copy. Since my last post there have been exciting new developments 'though! Yesterday when I tested it, the Bureau's large printer was lacking electricity, so they did it on another machine, reduced to A3. It was fine except for the mentioned. Today on the big printer was quite different.This time some of the polyline objects had the area of the bounding box around the actual object filled with black. The same thing applied to a couple of 45? wall segments (but not the original from which that plan view was duplicated).Both were commercial OCE Reprographics printer/ copying machines, and the small one still worked, except for .....Postscript printer drivers???Have you seen this ?

BTW font was Graphite (not MM), and I haven't tried another font - they were getting busy. I did try a DWG export 'though. My sheet has multiple scales, fills, hatches etc: nasty mess, ouch! I need more practice before I do that . cheers,N.

[aersloat]

Hmmm. If the file looks fine in Acrobat then it might just be related to the postscript interpreter that they have in their machines. Does Apple's Preview view the files correctly? I would try it with a TrueType font. You might have better success. Another thing that you might want to try is to skip the pdf step and output the file straight to postscript (.ps) [Output Options tab in the Print Dialog.] They should have a utility for sending postscript files directly to their plotter. Their tool is probably based on GhostScript. Which brings up the point that you can use MacGhostView (look on versiontracker.com) to preview the .ps file. I would say that if MacGhostView can render the rotated text correctly then the problem is on their side. If it can't, the problem is with VW, the font, or the OSX printer driver.

Let me know how it turns out-- I am curious. All this information is turning out to be a good resource.

------

Okay, since I am curious about these things I just ran a little experiment. I took a file I have been working on and rotated some of the text. I also dropped in a rotated section marker. We used to use Graphite MM but have switched to Tekton as OSX has no MM support. I output the file to .ps with the VW print options (rotated text and postscript only) both checked and unchecked. There was no difference in the size of the .ps files that resulted. I previewed both files in MacGhostView. Both rendered fine. I believe that MacGhostView substitutes the embedded fonts on the fly. I converted the files to pdf using macps2pdf, which is part of the MacGhostView package. Acrobat rendered the resulting file perfectly and reported that Tekton was embedded. I also printed the file on our LW 8500 and it looks fine. So, try the MacGhostView preview method.

[ 02-08-2002: Message edited by: aersloat ]