PDFs in your workflows

[micah.dickerson]

The AutoCAD team is conducting a research study about how PDFs are used in users' regular workflows, and we'd like to invite you to participate. The feedback you provide will be used to help improve AutoCAD. The online survey will take about 15 minutes to complete, and your responses will be kept strictly confidential.

To share your feedback and experiences, just follow this link: http://v2.decipherinc.com/survey/selfserve/9e2/crb14025?list=1&origin=paf

If you are interested in participating please be sure to take the survey right away, but not after December 5, 2014. The survey is being hosted and reported by independent research firms: Cooper Roberts Research, Inc. and Decipher, Inc.

Thanks in advance for your support!

[Cadguru42]

---

@TerryDotson wrote:

... the DWF format is also going to die ...

And if that happens it's there own fault for trying to totally control it.  They should have documented and published for format spec, provided freely accessable read and write drivers on multiple platforms and libraries in multiple languages to read and write them.  Openness leads to widespread use, control sufficates it.

PDF is badly lacking and is not better.  But because Adobe opened the format early, its the standard.

---

The DWF format is an open standard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Web_Format 

But with Autodesk killing the main program used to view, plot, and markup DWF they are effectively killing the format. 

[Neilw_05]

Someone has been able to influence Adobe to implement enhancements to the PDF format. That is where I believe the effort should be.

[Cadguru42]

---

@Neilw wrote:
Someone has been able to influence Adobe to implement enhancements to the PDF format. That is where I believe the effort should be.

---

Since PDF is an open format, shouldn't anyone be able to contribute to the format?

[TerryDotson]

DWFx is, DWF wasn't.

[Joe-Bouza]

I have avoided this post for fear of sounding ignorant, but to be honest the first thing I do is convert PDF to JPEG or tiff to be able to manipulate with Raster Design. Maybe I overlooked a PDF feature in Raster?

I do this to work in raster, but truth-be-told I find that performance degrades quickly with PDF underplays more so than with other images

[hencoop]

You can plot straight to JPG or TIFF (or just about any image format).  Then the image resolution is fixed and will not degrade.  It will be whatever resolution you specify.  The only things you'll need to add are a custom paper size that has the pixel dimensions that match your desired resolution and a pen table that has pen widths increased by the ratio of your desired resolution and 100dpi, i.e. multiply all of the pen sizes you will use by the target resolution divided by 100.  Otherwise, the higher the resolution, the thinner the pen widths even though the specified pen width remains unchanged.

[pendean]

2016 versions of AutoCAD (and C3D) now fully embrace PDF format much more than before (and rivalling DWF): still no 3D PDF, but they seem to think PDF overlays inside DWG files are much faster than before.

You can download trial versions to test starting Monday March 23, 2015.

[neilyj666]

It will be interesting to see if the underlays are any better than the current version.

[msisler]

Does it make sense that they're getting away from DWF to bolster the use of AutoCAD 360?

[Cadguru42]

---

@msisler wrote:

Does it make sense that they're getting away from DWF to bolster the use of AutoCAD 360?

---

From a business standpoint, yes. From an end user standpoint? No. PDFs are a pain to navigate in and is the main reason we still use the last Design Review (2013) not to mention that the file sizes are much more manageable with DWF. We will NEVER go to the cloud, so the fact that Autodesk stopped developing Design Review means we will have to find another setup once Design Review 2013 stops working. 

[Kevin.Spear]

While they havent branded a newer version of design review, the application is still viable. DWFx is actually used across many applications internally to produce previews. Vault relies heavily on dwf publishing as well.

As far as markup goes for the AEC world, it seems they are trying to push that usage into navisworks where all models are combined, etc.

That said, it would be nice if they simply updated the branding for design review and call it a day...

[mermerCAD]

Our company's biggest problem with printing to pdf is that Lines Merge doesn't work.  At least that's the result we seem to get, and that's what I have read.  To my knowledge, Bluebeam Revu CAD is the only pdf software that will do Lines Merge.  Am I wrong in this understanding?

The quality of our plots to pdf to not match our plots to the OCE from CAD, and display order can't fix all things to look like Lines Merge.

If I am mistaken, please let me know because if there is a way to get Lines Merge to work when plotting from CAD to PDF, it would be a huge help to my company.

Thanks so much!

Meredith

C3D 2014 sp2

Windows 7 64-bit

[hencoop]

I missed the window for the survey and have posted here before (also after missing the window).  I posted recently to the idea station regarding this topic and was reminded of this thread today.  What I posted on the idea station is here: http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/autocad-civil-3d-ideastation/plot-bitonal-black-white-dwg-through-tif-...

The summary of it is: Use the TIF raster plotter driver (or other bitonal TIF generator) to create the data put into the PDF. Let the user specify the dpi and make the pens behave normally regardless of the dpi setting.  Nothing but black & white pixels in the PDF so absolutely no interpretation of fonts or any other content can ever be made once the PDF is created.  It is permanently "fixed", small, what is seen is unalterable by any means (no layers, etc.).

[John_in_NZ]

Joe, you don't sound ignorant in the slightest.

When I'm inserting an image file into my dwg (which I do quite regulalry) my first choice format is tiff as it generally has no compression for AutoCAD to work with.

As for PDF creation, over the last 3-4 years it seems like all of the offices I've worked in have standardised on Bluebeam.

[Joe-Bouza]

Thank you John.
Is there a benefit to Bluebeam?

[mermerCAD]

Hi John-

I second Joe's question "Is there a benefit to Bluebeam?".

Our company is evaluating it now.  I was told it was the only way to get Lines Merge to work when printing to pdf, but I'm having difficulty finding a setting that works for lines merge, wipeouts, and background masks.

Thanks for any insight you can give us into Bluebeam.

Meredith

C3D 2014 sp2

[John_in_NZ]

Thanks for the questions.

To be blunt, I think the choice to go for Bluebeam over Acrobat is a financial one. 

Yes, the Bluebeam advertising material lists a hat full of additional features that it boasts are over and above Acrobat, and I'm sure that some folks will find a use for them, but for the most part I just require software to generate pdf output and occasionally do some basic mark-up, like a big red circle to identify sections of a drawing that I may refer to via email/phone.  On that basis I don't want or need too much from pdf software.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the Bluebeam interface as it's definitely ... "unique", but Bluebeam does what I need it to do, though there is an ancient old A1 laser printer which I've used recently that "prints" wipeouts as solid black when printed from Bluebeam, but not when printed from Acrobat (though I'm sure the printer should have been retired long ago).

However because of the "unusual" Bluebeam interface, if it was my personal choice, I'd just pay the extra and go for Acrobat, which might set you back an extra $150 a seat, which boils down to $0.20 an hour for the first 6 months of "ownership", but that's just my opinion and I offer it up as that, an opinion.

As for features like wanting to merge lines or control which line overlays what in a pdf writer, I wouldn't like to comment as it's not something that's ever been important to me or my clients. Perhaps it's a cultural thing, but in the environment I tend to work the decision is made either to send out pdf files, or vanilla dwg/dxf but dwg's are sent out to routinely.

Going on from the questions and getting back to the original topic, for me it would be nice if the workflow concerning pdf creation in Autodesk products could be as straight forward as MS Office, but after using Autodesk products for almost 3 decades I won't hold my breath, however I will count my luck stars that I'm currently using Acad/C3D and not having to deal with pdf "printing" from Revit [/rant] 

[CADmgrMike]

If you're looking for different opinions, we went with Acroplot from CADzation here.

Cost was one of the main reasons. It was 1/5 the cost of Bluebeam.

We have encountered very few difficulties printing to PDF. Plus it standardized our multi location offices to using one format.

Although I don't use lines merge, I do have a pc3 file setup that way for some other users.