How to use PDFCreator in BricsCAD VBA to plot pdf file?

Joe C

 Hi

Anybody know how to use PDFCreator in BricsCAD VBA to  plot pdf file?

Thanks

Joe Dunfee

 I use PDF creator. Once it is installed, it functions as though it were a printer.  So, you simply print to this PDF printer.

If you are creating multiple pages, you will need to allow PDF Creator to accumulate them.  When you print the 1st page, you choose "Wait Collect" button.  Then, you print all your pages, even if you have pages from something like a spreadsheet.  Once you have printed all the pages to the PDFCreator printer, you then go to the PDFCreators Print monitor, which is already open.

The next part is what confused me at the beginning.  There are a bunch of icons that don't really look like anything, so it is hard to tell which button does what.  But, one of them is the "combine all" button  (a small pop-up will show when you hover your mouse over each button).  Then, you need to use the "print" button, to get the window that allows you to save the PDF.

I actually use BricsCAD's built-in PDF export or publish functions most of the time.  The exception is if I have an Excel spreadsheet embedded on a layout. The built-in PDF publishing makes those so pixelated that they are useless.  PDFCreator is better for those types of objects.

-Joe

Hans De Backer

@Joe Dunfee:

I actually use BricsCAD's built-in PDF export or publish functions most of the time.  The exception is if I have an Excel spreadsheet embedded on a layout. The built-in PDF publishing makes those so pixelated that they are useless. 

Do you still experience this pixelation when using V14.2.13? This should have been considerably improved. If not, could you please file a support request and attach a sample, we would be grateful.

Kind regards,
Hans

Joe Dunfee

 I just loaded 12.3.13, and after convincing Norton to release the licensing file I tested with the embedded Excel that I pasted into a drawing.  It was quite usable.  The only drawback now is that it still does the Excel as a raster image. This causes the PDF I created to be about 10x bigger than if I create the PDF for my test drawing using PDFCreator, which saves the embedded Excel as text.   (20k vs 200k)

This is interesting, because it is the exact opposite of what PDFCreator does.  PDFCreators saves the Excel as Text, but the text in the drawing (which was .shx font) is saved as lines.   Whereas, BricsCAD saves the Excel as raster, and the text in the drawing is selectable as text, even when it is at an angle.

I should mention that my test drawing was just a few objects in modelspace, and then the Excel pasted into paper space.  I did another test using a much larger drawing, with only a small spreadsheet, on one of the 18 pages.  The BricsCAD version was a little over double the size of the PDFCreator version.  (2,300k vs 4,700k)

I will add that in the PDF Export settings, I have a check by "embed TTF fonts", and have unchecked the option to convert TTF and SHX text to geometry.

-Joe

S G

Not to hijack this thread but I would like to use the built in publish feature of BricsCAD but it does not work well.

Every time I try to use publish, it doesn't correctly print the last 2 to 4 drawings in the set and the PDFs end up in the folder with a 0kb file size which are not able to be opened.

Another issue I had was that the publish feature from within the sheet set manager does not prefix the sheet number to the pdf file name. The file name ends up being only the sheet title which doesn't help in automatically sorting drawings by sheet number. In AutoCAD I setup all my sheets in the sheet manager and whenever I need to print a few drawings or a whole set I just specify the folder and click a preset publish button and AutoCAD takes care of plotting everything in the background. This is one feature that I miss from AutoCAD.

As of late my sheet sets in BricsCAD keep throwing errors, this maybe due to how the drawings is referencing the sheet set though.

Not to be hating on BricsCAD at all but the sheet set and publish feature is not really production ready as of yet.

To the OP...why are you using VBA? Is not VBA depreciated as well as having the slowest run time out of all the other development options? I wounder if BRX would be the better option?

S G

 Sorry for the misspellings in previous post..I couldn't find an edit feature to fix them. e.g. *Wounder meant wonder

Joe Dunfee

I will mention a problem I have with the PDFCreator and BricsCAD.  From my 18-page example, I have certain layouts that come out rotated incorrectly in the PDF.  Yet, if I create the PDF using BricsCAD's internal PDF export, the pages are all oriented correctly.

I can use PDFXchange viewer (which has some editing and mark-up abilities) to manually correct the page rotation, but that is a pain. 

Since I only occasionally use embedded Excel spreadsheets, the only thing holding me back from exclusively using the BriscCAD PDF creator is the file size issue.  I wonder if there are settings that may help.  I just tried the Geometry Optimization, and it did help.  Note that this file has no embedded Excel like my earlier tests. Everything is native BricsCAD entitties.  There are no solid or granient hatches, which would be affected by the Hatch to Bitmap resolution option.

PDF Created with;

2,238 KB  PDFCreator

4,732 KB  BricsCAD without Geometry optimization.

4,132 KB  BricsCAD with Geometry optimization.

-Joe

S G

Joe Dunfee,

Within the print dialog box:

Go to the "Printer / Plotter configuration" Box and select PDFCreator then click on button to right of pull down menu, button is named "edit plotter config". Within this "Plotter Configuration Editor" window go to the "Settings" tab. Click on Custom Properties in the tree. Then Click on the Custom properties button within the "Access custom dialog" box which is below the tree box. A new window named PDFCreator Document Properties" opens, from there go to the "layout" tab and under the Orientation: pull down select "landscape". After that press ok, press ok, and save the PDFCreater.pc3 file when it asks you too. Within the Print dialog box make sure drawing orientation is on landscape as well. Select your paper size and and print...it should be in landscape.

Thanks,
Steven

Joe Dunfee

 Steven, thanks for the detailed instructions.  I have spent hours on this issue already. When I followed your instructions the problem layout tab did print properly.  However, all the other pages became messed up!

I should mention that all my print previews show up fine.  It is only when I use PDF Creator that the problem shows up.   I have also tried changinthe page setup name to be one of the pages that prints properly.  But, for some reason I can't get that setting choice to stick.  Note that you cannot choose a page setup name from the page setup window.  Rather, you must go to the print screen, but even then you cannot apply the change.  You must first preview the print, and then the "apply" button will be selectable. But, as I mentioned, the page setup name choice will not work.

I know that paper layout orientation has been a problem in the computing industry for decades.  The originating software, the OS, the printer driver, and the printer all have to agree on the paper orientation.  I suspect this is one of those unsolvable computer issues.

-Joe

S G

 Joe,

I think I follow you but I am not sure what you actually mean by "other pages" when they become messed up. Are you using publish or printing one by one for this test scenario?

Maybe using publish would help so that you can select all pages at once and use the same page setup from the page setup pull down for all pages.

If printing one by one from the print dialog, you have to go to page setup and print previous, after the first successful print run of course. To keep this persistent, well you would have to go to each page (assuming a page is a completely different .dwg file) and set the default page setup for each file...I think publish will be faster in this regard since you only have to setup one page.

You can also setup a template file that you use on all future drawings that have your most used page setups already created in the page setups. You can even import this template .dwt file from the page setups pull down within the publish window.

If PDF Creator is the issue, in PDF Creator 1.9.3, go to Profile Settings button and from the PDF tab at bottom left of window go to the general tab and make sure the Page Orientation is correct and matches the Drawing orientation you are using in BricsCAD page setup.

Also, from the Save tab at top left of window you can specify the automatic filename and then choose Automatic Saving and specify a target folder and change it when you need to print for each of your projects. This makes it were everything is done in the background. Just make sure open drawings after saving is not checked.

**NOTE** The attached screenshot may fix your issue while the above you probably already know. The attached screenshot is to show that in case there are any issues with the custom properties not being saved there is a button to save as...it saves as a .pc3 file, always use this afterwards "PDFCreator.pc3", or whatever you named it, from the Printer/Plotter configuration pull down, since that is the custom saved PDFCreator printer configuration.

Thanks,

Steven

printbricscadpdfcreater.PNG

Joe Dunfee

Steven, thank you for the detailed reply.

When I did my test, I used the publish function to print to the PDFCreator printer.

When I say the other pages are messed up, I mean that when I followed your instructions on the layout that was rotated incorrectly, that page came out properly  but all the other layouts were rotated incorrectly.

When I publish, I choose the output as "Plotter named in page setup".  Each page setup listed says ",Default: None>, and each plot device is the same PDFCreator.pc3.  

On the problem layout tab, in the printer setup,  I have tried saving a named pages setup, but for that effort my "print to extents" setting does not work properly, and it chops off the titleblock.

Attached is a screen grab of the publish screen showing the settings.  The 1st page of the list is rotated incorrectly when I publish.

-Joe

Publish to PDFCreator screen.PNG

S G

I am going to try and be even more detailed to rule out any issues with just one file. Can you do these below in order? This will rule out any issues because every sheet in the publish window will use the same page setup to print. (I am assuming you are setting up each page setup to be the same in each sheet since they are all have the same plot size of 11x17?)

Go to the drawing with layout "temp-10 trash" since you said this sheet was rotated correctly in your last sentence of previous post.

Then type print in command bar and hit enter

At top of print dialog box select print previous in page setup name box.

Then click the little save setting button right next to that pull down and save as a name you prefer such as "NewDefault"

Then don't print and just click cancel to get out of the print dialog box.

Then Save the drawing so that the "NewDefault" is saved as a page setup in the drawing for later use.

Now go to publish and add your three drawings/sheets you showed in your previous screenshot/screengrab.

Then Select all three sheets (which are layouts) and make sure they are highlighted.

Then click twice on one of the page setups under the page setup column until you see the pull down menu.

Then click import.

Then go find that drawing with layout "temp-10 trash" in it and import it.

Then select that same pull down again under the page setups column.

You should see "NewDefault" or whatever you had previously named it above, so go ahead and select that.

Then hit publish.

You should be good to go.

I myself am not happy with the publish features as they do not prefix my sheet numbers from the sheet set and when I use the straight publish command I have to edit the sheet names before I publish since it automatically appends the drawing name to the PDF sheet name.

Joe Dunfee

 Sorry for the very late reply, I was caught up with getting productive work done, and had to table the hunt for a solution for a while.

Though I think I had tried your approach in the past, I went through the process you suggested again just now.  The page rotate for the problem pages is still wrong. But, perhaps I didn't fully understand the last several steps.  Here is what I did;

The first several steps [1-6] seem easy enough.

   1) Go to the drawing with layout "temp-10 trash" since you said this sheet was rotated correctly in your last sentence of previous post.

   2) Then type print in command bar and hit enter

   3) At top of print dialog box select print previous in page setup name box.

   4) Then click the little save setting button right next to that pull down and save as a name you prefer such as "NewDefault"

   5) Then don't print and just click cancel to get out of the print dialog box.

   6) Then Save the drawing so that the "NewDefault" is saved as a page setup in the drawing for later use.

J> I did try to publish at this point, to see if using the saved page set-up solved the problem itself.  But it did not.
J> The steps below are not totally clear to me.  Am I correct that the process is to go to the process of publishing 
J> the pages, but then delete those pages from the list, and then re-insert the pages to the list that will be published?

   7) Now go to publish and add your three drawings/sheets you showed in your previous screenshot/screengrab.

J> Do you mean to first delete the one that has the incorrectly rotated page?  I should note that my drawing
J> has all the layouts in a single drawing file.  As I did the following steps, what I did was to delete the problem
J> pages, and then changed the page setup to the one I had saved earlier.
J> Then I imported the pages I had deleted earlier, in hopes the page set-up will now come in fresh.

   8) Then Select all three sheets (which are layouts) and make sure they are highlighted.

   9) Then click twice on one of the page setups under the page setup column until you see the pull down menu.

   10) Then click import.

   11) Then go find that drawing with layout "temp-10 trash" in it and import it.

   12) Then select that same pull down again under the page setups column.

   13) You should see "NewDefault" or whatever you had previously named it above, so go ahead and select that.

   14) Then hit publish.

After all the above, the problem pages were still rotated incorrectly.  I have also started a new drawing, which was to have several layouts. In this case, all the pages are rotated incorrectly, and I cannot figure out how to get them to print to the PDF with any of them rotated correctly.  In the page set-up it is landscape, it shows print-preview as landscape, and then in the PDF all the pages are portrait.

I looked at the printer settings, and have gotten nowhere there either.  There is an option buried deep in the advanced settings to choose portrait, landscape, or rotated landscape.  But there is no change, regardless of which one I choose. All the PDF pages were portrait.

-Joe

I have a new s

Joe Dunfee

 I just tried a different PDF printer driver creator, BullZip.  But, the results are exactly the same as with PDFCreator.

I would use the internal save to PDF in BricsCad, but some of my drawing PDF file sizes are now 7 meg.  Adding the size penalty for the internal PDF save process would make the file size unacceptably large.

-Joe

Joe Dunfee

 Let me ask what the behavior should be, in terms of using a named page setting.  If I choose a named page set-up, should it remember it, or should that field show empty the next time switch to that tab?

-Joe

Joe Dunfee

Some more detail about my efforts to use a saved print setting.

In my case, clicking "apply" only once means it will forget what I put there before.  But, hitting apply, close the print dialog box, then do it again, seems to cause the setting to stick.  Perhaps this is getting at the root of my entire problem. 

-Joe