PDF plotting - Can Trueview increase plotting speed?

[Jay_B]

Today we had a user request that Trueview be installed on all workstations with C3d installed.

They were told that this would increase pdf plotting speed of pdfs created in Civil 3d by

a 10 fold factor?

I haven't heard this before and don't presently have Trueview installed.

We normally plot to pdf using SSM using the DWG to PDF.pc3.

Anyone have any experience with Trueview increasing plotting performance?

Any insight is appreciated.

[Joe-Bouza]

Hi Jay

I cannot confirm or deny trueview speed, but I can confirm lowering the dpi used by the pc3 file makes for smaller file size and reduced plot time.

[Anonymous]

Trueview is incredibly faster in plotting sheets (we plot to PDF) versus Civil 3D.  Last week I plotted 30 section view sheets with Trueview in 2 minutes.  With Civil 3D i would had taken a minimum of 20 seconds per sheet.  These are approximate times but it gives you an idea of how much faster Trueview actually is.  I would recommend you test Trueview out on one machine before you put it on everyone's machine and see what the results are.  We started out installing it on a few machines and ultimately have installed it on all machines.

It would be nice if they would have just incorporating this plotting speed from Trueview into Civil 3D in the first place but at least Trueview is a tool that users can incorporate to improve plotting speed.  We plot upwards of hundreds of sheets so Trueview has become an essential tool for us in speeding up plan assembly.

[Joe-Bouza]

Wow. can I assume from what you say about your shop the TV supports batch plotting? does it support SSM?

[Jay_B]

Thanks for the reply.

I'm also curious if Sheet Set Manager can be utilized with Trueview? Not finding anything indicating it can.

This would change workflow considerably as SSM Fields would become useless.

Another question that comes to mind is how does / can Trueview handle updating of Data References etc.?

For example, if I'm plotting Production Sheets using Trueview which another user did profile edits in source dwg etc., then I probably would need to be aware of those updates and open each sheet & save in C3d (for dref synchronization to occur) prior to plotting the sheets. Otherwise the profiles on Production sheets would reflect the outdated version prior to edits. Also wonder about data link updates as we use the acaddoc.lsp to force data link updates so a full open isn't necessary.

Or does Trueview have a means of handling above scenarios?

Just might have to get Trueview installed to test some of these things.

[KirkNoonan]

Jay,

Trueview doesn't speak SSM. It will do batch plotting (publishing). Is the issue the flattening that Adobe does before it will plot the pdf files sometimes? We have had issues with that as well. It seems like random sheets from a published pdf set will take forever to plot because of the flattening that goes on. These same sheets will print from Acrobat just fine when they are potted indivdually with the DWG to PDF pc3 file. It seems, also, to be alleviated by carefully setting the draw order of your layers and objects and publishing with lines overwrite selected instead of lines merge. I don't think that the Trueview will make any difference there, but please share your results.

There are a few post-plot flattening options that you might also want to try. This might help: http://www.pryslak.net/FlattenPDF.html

Kirk

[Anonymous]

We still use Sheet Set Manager to set up our sheets and layouts in Civil 3D.  The only function we use Trueview for is to actually plot those layouts from DWG to PDF.

With Data Shortcut References and Xref's, I am not sure if a user still needs to open a file in Civil 3D to update and save it before plotting with Trueview but would guess this is the case.  Just started using Trueview recently.

[Jay_B]

Thanks to all for the information.