Best format to send an electronioc file of VectorWorks to get printed at a Print Shop

[Andrew Mac]

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I am running VectorWorks 11.5 and I want to send a file to get printed at a print shop. My questions is what is the best way to send the file. I spoke with the print shop and they said if I just want things printed then I can send it as a plot file. Not quite sure if I can do that from VectorWorks.

Any ideas of the best way to send an electroic file to a print shop to get printed on 24 X 36 ?

[Kevin]

I use PDF and it works great.

[Ramon PG]

I also use PDF and it does work fine, esp. with fonts. And I did not have to tinker at all with color descriptions. Just print to PDF. Some print bureaus are not familiar with it since most PC users can't readily make PDFs like Mac users. But they could learn a thing or two. Mine prints PDFs from either Photoshop or Acrobat. They learned.

[Andrew Mac]

How do I create a PDF file??

I am a PC user.

I don't think I have the software to create PDF's

[Travis]

It would pay you to do a search on the VW Print board for threads related to PDF. Over the last couple of years there have been several posts that will walk you through the steps and help you avoid some common pitfalls.

You will need a pdf "generator" (the most common, and IMHO the most reliable, is Adobe Acrobat/Distiller) and you'll need to be sure to have it configured for the proper output size. But all of this, and much more, you should be able to find from the search.

If you're still unsure, please post this on the Print board. You'll get plenty of knowledgeable eyes looking at it there.

Good luck,

[alanmac]

quote:

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Originally posted by Ramon PG:

Some print bureaus are not familiar with it since most PC users can't readily make PDFs like Mac users.

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I doubt very much if any "professional" print bureau had not heard of PDF, or does not offer printing from PDF.

I think you'll find despite the fact that Windows in its OS does not have a built in facility to print pdfs in the same way as OSX, the many free pdf creators available such as pdf995 actually give superior results in Windows than the Mac OS version anyway.

There has been several posts concerned about the changing of line thickness on diagonal lines in Mac created pdfs. There are workarounds for the Mac user as also discussed using postscript options.

amacbabe, your choice is much easier and simplier.

Just go over to www.software995.com/

grab yourself a copy of not only the free pdf creator but the free pdf editor which allows you to combine pdfs into a multipage pdf and you are set to go.

You'll also find that pdf is a great way of sending files to other people to look at who you want to show your drawings to, but not work on them or import into another cad program.

Beats sending jpegs etc.

Alanmac

[ 09-15-2005, 01:53 PM: Message edited by: alanmac ]

[mike m oz]

A couple of cautions with the Mac OS PDF options:

It does not embed the fonts so if the print bureau does not have the required font you will end up with substituted fonts and an awful result (The only two PDF fonts which appear to come with Tiger are Helvetica and Courier) I discovered this the hard way with prints back from the print bureau which had all of the text as Courier. They were unuseable.

The save as Postscript file and then convert to PDF using Preview option only works for the standard list of document sizes. If you create a custom size of an A1 page it will only print a part of the whole drawing roughly equal to an A4 sheet at 97% in the top LH corner of the sheet. The only way around this is to use an A3 sheet at 50% which gives you an A1 drawing in effect. The Print Bureau will then have to blow up the resulting drawing to 100%. Unfortunately there is a loss of quality in doing this.

Moral to this is do some trials first and bed down the process before you send off an important and/or expensive job to the printer.

Better still invest in the latest OSX version of Acrobat so that the fonts are embedded in the PDF documents and the page size can be whatever you want.

[ 09-15-2005, 09:20 PM: Message edited by: mike m oz ]

[John Oualline]

As a PC and MAC user, I suggest using PDF as well - go to Adobe Acrobat and buy the Adobe Acrobat 7.0 software. Then, you can make a portable document format (PDF) file. Acrobat is great for any circulation of file types between MAC and PC.

[Ramon PG]

quote:

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Originally posted by mike m oz:

It does not embed the fonts so if the print bureau does not have the required font you will end up with substituted fonts and an awful result...

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Lucky me. I sent a really expensive job to print using Lucida Grande and did not have the embedded font problem. I used to have problems trying to plot hatches in PDFs from PowerCADD. The Mac OS eventually fixed the PDF quality problems, at least as far as I can observe. And of course VectorWorks is tops.

[alanmac]

quote:

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Originally posted by John Oualline:

As a PC and MAC user, I suggest using PDF as well - go to Adobe Acrobat and buy the Adobe Acrobat 7.0 software. Then, you can make a portable document format (PDF) file. Acrobat is great for any circulation of file types between MAC and PC.

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Only if you need the increased capabilities that it offers, otherwise pdf995 or similiar will work just fine and save you a lot of money.

I regularly send pdf files created with pdf995 to both Mac and PC users alike with no problems.

Of course the program itself is Windows only, but that's fine because so is the original poster, but there are options on Mac as well cheaper than Adobes program.

Alan

[ 09-20-2005, 09:00 AM: Message edited by: alanmac ]

[Jeffrey W Ouellette]

Try novaPDF Professional @ www.novapdf.com. Works well as a basic PDF creator for much less than Acrobat.