Drawings and PF

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Permalink Reply by lorbus on April 2, 2009 at 11:04pm

Martin, I'm on the same boat as you.
Most of the work I do is built by carpenters!

This past week I've been looking for a way to raise the resolution in PDF and I still haven't found a method.
At least now I know I am not the only one!

I also get a "document failed to print" error when I add dimension lines. (when I print to PDF)
Any ideas on this?

Thanks
lorenzo

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Permalink Reply by martin kopplow on April 3, 2009 at 2:21am

Lorenzo,

the "failed to print" error happens on my laptop. I do not know why, but it appears I cannot print from spaceclaim on my laptop at all. I have not yet seen it on my desktop box, so I use that one for all printing. It would be nice, though, If I could print at home, too. People tend to call me after office hours in case of problems and having PDF drawings available then to send away by email would help at times.

Regarding PDF resolution, I think it's interesting that when printing to a (hardware) printer, the resolution seems much better. That's one thing I do not understand: To Spaceclaim, Adobe's PDF Printer must look like any other printer, and with other applications I also do not have the resolution issue. So where's the problem?

Martin

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Permalink Reply by Blake Courter on April 9, 2009 at 1:43pm

Hi Martin and Lorenzo,

When you print a SpaceClaim drawing, including printing to PDF, shaded views get printed as raster graphics. Currently, the resolution is 72 DPI, but R&D is working on allowing you to control this.

If you use a wireframe or hidden line mode, the graphics should be precise vector art. I use this technique frequently to move graphics to Adobe Illustrator for post-processing.

-Blake

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Permalink Reply by lorbus on April 15, 2009 at 8:34am

Thanks a lot for the replies Martin and Blake.
Sorry for the delay, I was on a computer-free vacation. :0)

I'll try the Illustrator trick.
Let's hope the SC team can pull it off.
I like to feature shaded views in my drawings, and higher-res is definitely a plus.

See you around,
lorenzo

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Permalink Reply by martin kopplow on April 16, 2009 at 2:25am

I noticed one more thing:

After I connected a larger screen to my PC, I can still work in good resolution in the modeling window, though as soon as I switch to a drawing, I can see a loss in rendering quality even on the screen. That is to say: I see a need to increase rendering resolution in drawings, both for print output and screen display.

For now, as a work around, a screen shot of the object in the model window placed on the drawing as an image file yields much better results than using a dawing view.

Martin

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Permalink Reply by R. Schaft on April 25, 2009 at 11:02am

Maybe it is a great idea to transfer the shaded view to vector art. Spaceclaim would be the first application who has that feature as far as I know of. It could be a selling point.
It would be at least a time saviour for anyone who converts to Adobe Illustrator for whatever reason.

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Permalink Reply by martin kopplow on April 28, 2009 at 1:06am

Hi Blake,

when you transfer graphics to Illustrator, do you use PDF or something else?

AFAIK, without having Adobe Acrobat installed, we cannot create 2D PDF out of Spaceclaim right now, only 3D, do we? Wouldn't it be a good thing, if Spaceclaim automatically created a 3D PDF when the exported model is 3D, while creating a 2D vector PDF when the exported document is a sheet? That would make sense to me, as exporting a sheet to 3D is most probably not what is intended most of the times.

Martin

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Permalink Reply by martin kopplow on April 28, 2009 at 8:22am

I just tied transferring a wireframe printed as a PDF from Spaceclaim to Freehand, and it did not work: I got an empty sheet in Freehand. Are there any strategies I missed to observe?

Martin

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Permalink Reply by Tijs Driessen on August 24, 2009 at 12:08am

Hi,

I've got the same problem. Creating a 2D PDF from spaceclaim seems impossible. Only printing to PDF works, but that indeed could be better.

Tijs

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Permalink Reply by Blake Courter on April 28, 2009 at 8:41am

I print PDFs from SpaceClaim hidden line drawings to open them in Illustrator. DXF/DWG also works, but I prefer PDF because Illustrator seems to play tricks with the drawing scale.

-Blake

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