PDF looks bad on screen unless magnified

[james_moore]

Is there a way to make PDF files with Plot and Publish such that I get a decent looking image on screen in Adobe reader without zooming in?  See picture.  I have always used a PDF generator on my system that acts as a printer, but that only produces raster files - no searchable/selectable text.  If i want searchable text, I get this crappy looking output that only improves if you zoom in.  I want my PDFs to look like the second image AND get searchable text.  Is this possible?  Do I have to switch to a true-type font instead of using .shx?  I want the graphics to look uniform right from the start, not this half-grey stuff.

[dgorsman]

This is a fairly old issue, but not necessarily an AutoCAD-based one.  The display depends on both AutoCAD and the reader; if you print using the built-in DWG to PDF PC3 and view on Adobe, it looks like that.  If you view the PDF in Bluebeam or other viewers it looks OK.  If you print using BlueBeam, Acroplot, or other third-party PDF "printers" it will look OK in Adobe and other readers.  In all cases the content is fine, it's the display in Adobe that's off.

You might try toggling some of the graphics options in Adobe, such as "Enhance thin lines" and "Smooth line art".

For best results in getting searchable text you should be using TTF fonts, with a width factor of 1.0.

[pendean]

use a different non-Adobe PDF viewer or change your PDF viewer display settings, you cannot control that from AutoCAD: here are mine from Adobe Acrobat DC

Remember to tell everyone that uses crappy Adobe Acrobat that you send PDFs to they need to do the same.

[userlevel6]

Thanks for the suggestions, but I think I've already found a better solution, one that doesn't care what crappy PDF viewer one uses.  I'm not about to tell the customers we send our IOM manuals to which PDF program they need to view our electronic manuals.

Temporarily, or permanently, change the text style.  Frankly, I believe I can control nearly anything from within ACAD.  We use Acrobat in my Engineering Support department, and the rest of the company uses Acrobat Reader, and that is not going to change, nor is it something I can control - that's IT dept's job.

I'm already accustomed to using ACAD script-based solutions for plotting, so what I'm now pursuing is developing a .scr that changes from .SHX-based styles to TTF-based, on the fly, before using DWG to PDF.pc3... or possibly another .pc3... only worked on it for about 15 minutes so far.  So far the only issue I'm having with such a solution is getting ACAD -plot to NOT prompt for a .PDF filename.  And if I convince our electrical engineers to change our standard to true-type font-based text styles, it should work well making multi-sheet PDF files using Plot and Publish too.

I'll post more on this next week. 😉

[pendean]

If SHX to TTF is another option, that is a good one too. Most users are not able to make that leap, so it's just another workaround.

The LISP forum has plenty of tips for your no-prompt need on PDF creation if you want to look there https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/autocad-customization/ct-p/AutoCADTopic1

[Kent1Cooper]

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@userlevel6 wrote:

.... Temporarily, or permanently, change the text style. .... what I'm now pursuing is developing a .scr that changes from .SHX-based styles to TTF-based, on the fly, before using DWG to PDF.pc3...

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Character proportions vary by font.  And not just characters, but spaces -- AutoCAD's .SHX fonts tend to have considerably wider spaces than most .TTF fonts, in my experience.  And line spacing also varies by font.  So if you do the change-font thing, I suspect you'll end up with Mtext with some line-wrap locations changed, and sometimes wrapping to different numbers  of lines, or even at the same number of lines being taller or shorter, and Text objects that are longer or shorter than they were, and Dimensions whose text content changes from inside the extension lines to outside them or vice versa, and Tables with cells that get kicked to two lines of content instead of one or the reverse, and so on.  In most cases if a font change results in things getting a little narrower, maybe it doesn't matter much, though you could for example have [plain] Leaders that don't relate well any more to what they're pointing from.  But in cases where things get a little wider, or Mtext's line spacing getting a little higher, you can easily end up with stuff overlapping other stuff that didn't before.  I would feel a need to do a lot of careful checking.  I think it's an argument for permanently  changing the Style(s), and using something that you know will produce a good result from the beginning.

[userlevel6]

Thanks!  Yep, those are all valid concerns for sure.

Our default style uses simplex.shx at .75 width, and in my test I went from that to using Arial Narrow at 1.0 width.  I tested this on a sheet that has mostly MTEXT and it worked very well.  I'll know more next week when I use the method across a range of drawings.

[james_moore · Accepted solution]

Here's the script I'm using now... so far, so good across the first couple of jobs I've run it on.  I should note also that "DWG to PDF.pc3" controls whether or not bookmarks are included, and I used a full "plot details" approach vs using a named "Page Setup" because it was the easy way to specify "Landscape" vs defining another page setup to be injected into our standards.  Making a permanent change to our default text style will have to wait until we decide to go that way as an Engineering Department standard, but in the meantime this method produces what I want - separate PDF documents per sheet that have searchable text that is clear upon opening the PDFs in Acrobat / Acrobat Reader. 😉

-style
Shrink
"Arial Narrow"
0
1
0
No
No
-plotstamp
LOCation
BL
Horizontal
No
11.35,0.24
B

PSPACE
PLQUIET
0
-PLOT
Y

DWG to PDF
ANSI full bleed B (17.00 x 11.00 Inches)
Inches
Landscape
No
Window
0,0
16.5,10.5
Fit
0,0.120
Yes
Optra_N_EE.ctb
Yes
No
No
No

N
Y

[esedess123]

A lot of complicated answers...

Here's the simple solution:

Ctrl+K

Page Display

In "Rendering" section, UNcheck "Smooth line art"

Click OK

[james_moore]

yeah, in Adobe...  I'll give that a try if I ever plot to PDF with .shx fonts again.

We're way beyond that now.  ACE publishing automatically does what I was doing via script, re:substituting TTF for .SHX fonts, by switching which .fmp file to use (either acad.fmp, or acade.fmp)