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Using PDF's in drawings


HEengineering

Question

We do this a lot and whether its a screen capture a png or a PDF, typically up until now you would set this items to a solid black fill and publish the pdf and it would come out as expected.  

 

We had a file in 2017 that had some PDF's and updated to version 20 just today.  This PDF now when set to a black fill actually fills it like its an object fill (see video). However it does publish correctly and visible on a Publish to PDF.  Keep in mind this now makes it invisible in the actual vwx file.

 

Now if I set that same PDF to a white fill it shows in the cad file but doesn't publish out.

 

It seems to only effect certain pdfs.  Why is it some PDFs can accept a fill and publish correctly while others don't?  Watch the video to see what Im describing.  Most PDF's do not be have this way.

 

Its puzzling.  It seems to have to do with only select PDF's and maybe the way the VW 2020 is processing them?

 

If needed I can post a video showing the expected behavior in 2017

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What happens if you set the VW background colour to white?

 

I've noticed in the past that some PDF's display well when VW has a white background and not so well when it has a black background, depending on how the PDF was generated and whether it was rasterized or vector.

 

Another possibility, but I would have to test this myself for VW2020, is that the colours in the PDF are not indexed colours but RGB colours and not 100% black, or the indexed colour is not black but very dark grey. In that case the colour reversal may not work properly and negatively affect your PDF output.

 

If you could share a PDF that has this issue I could have a look at it.

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If I set it to white its visible in VWX but then publishes to PDF as a black box.  Is there a way to determine if the PDF is Vector or raster? I even tried the rasterize pdf option in the publish menu and it had no effect on the outcome.

 

Mostly looking to see if this is behavior others have seen. Art I will send you the PDF in a DM.  

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For those also interested in this topic...

 

The PDF black colours are partly (approx. 10%) in RGB and the rest is as grayscale. The PDF was created with Quartz.

 

On my windows machine using a white and a black background both gave proper output with the PDF showing as it should, though with black background I got the same invisibility issue as @HEengineering on my screen. My guess is that the grayscale in the PDF is preventing proper colour reversal of the black lines to white lines, but that is something that VW staff would have to confirm if that is the case or not.

 

Because the export/publish is ok on my machine it could be that it is an issue related to just the Mac version. Unless I am mistaken the publish to PDF on Mac uses the Quartz engine, whereas VW on windows directly outputs to PDF using a different process, so perhaps this might (also) have to do with the issue as well, but this wouldn't explain why the white background gives a black box of the PDF on publishing it as PDF.

 

Maybe someone from VW can give some more info on this?

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Has there been anything further on this? I'm having a similar problem with PDF's on 2021 for Mac. The imported PDF shows up with a white background on the sheet layer and when published to a PDF, but if I publish to a printer or print the PDF its background is black. 

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I'm currently using VW less than in the past and rarely import PDF's into VW so I have not noticed the issue so far in my case, but it could be that the PDF's I used behaved better or that it is a Mac/Quartz only issue, so I can't say for sure if the original underlying issue ever got solved. By the sound of the problem you have it seems it hasn't been solved yet.

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