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.
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.
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If you are going to fly by the seat of your pants, expect friction burns.
"I don't know" is the beginning of knowledge, not the end.
If you are going to fly by the seat of your pants, expect friction burns.
"I don't know" is the beginning of knowledge, not the end.
@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...
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.
Kent Cooper, AIA 
