Plotting to PDF with Transparency - Problems with Flattening to Print
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Dear Members,
I would like you assistance with an issue regarinding PDF printing that has been proving time-consuming in our office.
Background:
We often use PDFs as a means of transmitting information to clients and for any digital records that we keep on the server. This allows them to be opened by anybody in the office without requiring any additional software to be downloaded - e.g. Autodesk Design Review or Autodesk Trueview.
Our current method of exporting PDFs is either through the Plot command using the inbuilt 'DWG to PDF' plotter with Autocad or via the Publish command where we can batch plot and easily remove layer information. The inbuilt 'DWG to PDF' gives the best PDF results from all the plotters that we have tried; it doesn't pixelate any text on the drawings and seems to avoid any issue with triangular plot hatches.
We are trying to move away from any photoshopping post-drawing as this leads to huge workflow problems later when small changes are made - e.g. small change to elevation, plot to pdf, rasterize pdf, make changes to photoshop, print to pdf again. As such, we have started to make use of the transparency command across full drawing sets.
In plans, it is useful as it allows us to XREF in a landscape plan and gradually lighten it on upper floor by adjusting the transparency. In elevations & sections, we can add basic shadows that are comparable with photoshop.
Problem:
Following the use of transparencies, we can plot directly to our large printers without issue. We can create PDFs without issue. However, the PDFs that we produce are almost unprintable - this is the main issue.
The time that it takes to flatten the PDFs is almost unworkable and, when a drawing does finally print, there are often errors in the plots.
For our local commercial print workshop, we send them PLTs so that they can print them correctly; the PDFs do not print correctly for them.
Some users in the office say that Microstation could produce comparable PDFs and there was never a single issue with printing them but I do not have any experience with that software so I could not object.
Query:
Can Autocad flatten a PDF so that in appearance it is similar to a PDF with transparency but actually only uses solid colours? I.e. Similar in speed to a rasterized photoshop but still with most of the vector information. As in if I had a black rectangular hatch @ 50% transparency, autocad would plot the pdf with a grey rectangular hatch rather than using the transparency information.
