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Setting the Scale in a PDF


bcd

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Acrobat facilitates a crude 2d & 3d measuring tool and provides for the user to:

Use Scales And Units From Document (When Present) When enabled, measurements based on the units generated from the original document, if present, are used. Deselect this option to specify the units of measurements manually.

Is there a way to attach this information from VW when exporting a Sheet or even a Design Layer to PDF?

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I don't think you can instruct Vectorworks to include the units and scale information into the document structure of the PDF. It either does it or it doesn't.

If it doesn't then you have to set the scale and units manually. Unless you have a known dimension in your file then basically your only option is to add a graphical scale so that you can set the scale manually.

Printing at 100% may not be feasible depending on the size of your drawings.

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Make sure that you set your design or sheet layer to the correct paper size prior to exporting as PDF. Don't use "Printer Page" options.

When exporting the PDF use "Export whole prinatable area as 1 page"

Then use "Page scaling = None" when printing. As a back-up quote your page size & the scale you used when sending your file to a print establishment for large page size prints that you cannot perhaps do yourself.

You may also include a scale bar reference to act as a visual double check.

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I don't think you can instruct Vectorworks to include the units and scale information into the document structure of the PDF. It either does it or it doesn't.

If it doesn't then you have to set the scale and units manually. .

Thanks for the responses.

The functionality is there in Acrobat for the client to pull quick dimensions from a scaled drawing, setting the scale automatically. If VW cannot include the scale & units currently perhaps I should wish-list it.

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I just doublechecked by opening a PDF exported from VW2011 by using the PDF export option.

It does not give the real world sizes but the rescaled sizes.

(i.e. a 1000m scale bar on a PDF with scale 1:12500 gives 80mm as measured distance and not 1000m)

Unless things changed Vectorworks does seem to have a license from Adobe to use their PDF engine to create PDFs so it one would expect that VW can include the additional information on units and scale into the exported PDFs.

So I guess we have do a wish-list item coming up.

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