Text not on scale when exporting to PDF from Layout

Clemens Karlhuber

 Hi, got another issue with exporting to pdf. I also have an open ticket with this issue.

Thought I can share it here, too:

I was running into this whilst the final days of a project.
Preparing my layouts I realised that after exporting my layouts to PDF, all test- objects were a lot smaller than seen in layout- space. Even text put directly on a sheet was way smaller.
First I thought that it was a scale, layout, viewport or style thing but after opening a clean template I was able to reproduce the oddness right away.
I´ve included a couple of screenshots and the actual DWG for you to investigate.
Please look into this.
Thanks in advance.

Marcus Richter

Hi Clemens,

I have the same problem and I also have an open ticket because of this.

A guy from the service-team told me a work around. Here is his answer:

Meanwhile, could you please use 'Print' to PDF?
For this, install PDFWritter (it is a free and powerfull PDF printer), then select it as printer in 'Print' dialog.
If you set PDFWritter in 'Page Setup' you could also use it with 'Publish' command.

(FYI:
PDFWritter save the PDF files into this location:
'Macintosh HD/users/shared/PDFWriter/'
which unfortunately is not editable, but you could create an alias folder for easier access.)

Now I HAVE A NEW PROBLEM:

It´s not possible for me to print any file. Regardless which printer (PDF and real) I use.
It´s always the same: a blank, white sheet of paper/PDF. The plot-preview in BricsCAD shows the same. Just a blank (white) page.

May you try to use the PDFwriter. And tell me if it works for you, please.

Looking forward to fix this problem very soon, cause it´s really not possible to work with this bug. And this is an expensive problem for everyone who needs to work with this application.

My best regards,

Marcus

plot preview 1.tiff

Marcus Richter

 By the way, if you want to use PDFWriter with El Capitan u have to install it in this way:

http://sourceforge.net/p/pdfwriterformac/discussion/1246009/thread/b5983847/?limit=25

best regards

Knut Hohenberg

I can confirm that both issues are not Mac-specific, but occur on Linux as well.

As to the wrong font scaling: this is a long standing problem. A SR that I opened in 2013 / on V13 (#41434) has been followed for some time, but was eventually closed in 2014 / V15 with the comment: "our team is aware about this issue but we don't have short plans to work on this".

I hope this will change one day, but in the mean time, you seem to have two options to get correctly scaled font output:

1.) either you use pdf export with PdfTtfTextAsGeometry enabled, which would result in triangulated text output (a rather crude workaround),
or
2.) you print to pdf, which will result - at least with cups-pdf - in text converted to filled paths (it should actually result in text as text if TTFASTEXT has the second bit set, but this is - again on linux - not working at the moment, maybe because ghostscript is used for conversion).

See the attached pdfs for comparison.

As to the second issue (vanishing print output): this happened to me as well, when I tried to print the layout of the originally attached dwg after just setting the "Printer / Plotter configuration"  to my pdf printer. The command history showed:

: _print
Plotter configuration not found
You have reached the limits of zooming in. Unable to zoom in any closer.

I then tried to open the page layout again, but this failed with the message:

: CPAGESETUP
Cannot set d to that value.

My guess is that the paper size did not get correctly initialized in this case, so I closed and reopened the file, chose the pdf-printer again, and then explicitly selected an existing paper size (A4) from the drop-down-list prior to printing - this worked and produced the attached file with cups-pdf in its name.

You'll have to see for yourself if this also clears the problem with pdf-writer; if not, you could give cups-pdf a try.

67223-TextAsGeometry.pdf67223-cups-pdf.pdf

Marcus Richter

Hi Knut, thanks a lot for your help!!

But let me get this right... this is a known problem since V13?? So it´s not possible to publish pdf with right scaled text since V13? 

I can´t believe this, I payed over 700,- € for an application that can´t publish correct pdf files?

That´s really crazy, to say the least.

This need to be fixed!!

To use pdf export with text as geometry worked fine for me. Thanks a lot for this tip! And yes, you´re right, it´s a rather crude workaround.

Print to pdf still doesn´t work for me. I did it in the same way as you do, but every time I get a blank file.

I tried it with PDFwriter, cups and VipRiser. All printers worked fine with other applications like osx`s preview. But with BricsCAD I just get a blank PDF.

I added some screenshots, may you have an other idea to fix this...?

Thanks a lot for your time and help.

kind regards

27239-L_SUEDKAMPFBAHN_V2_160129 LAGE.pdfSCREENSHOT plot preview.tiffSCREENSHOT settings.tiff

Clemens Karlhuber

 Hi Marcus and Knut,

Thanks for your replies and suggestions.

I have tested installing PDFwriter and VipRiser and using them for making pdfs successfully. And took quite a while to see what the output was, because bricsCad seemed to crash but in the end the pdfs where there. It is a workaround, nothing more.

Lucky me but no blank pages until now.

I fully agree that a commercial CAD product should be able to publish to pdf without any errors like this.

kind regards 

Clemens

Knut Hohenberg

Hi Marcus,

the scaling problem did not occur with all fonts when I raised the SR, and printing to pdf always worked for me, so I considered this issue not a pressing one. But if for some reason printing to pdf stops working, that's of course a different story!

I think the problem I described when trying to print the layout may have been due to an invalid "Custom" paper size entry in the ppd file of the cups-pdf printer. But all settings in your page setup look correct, and if you experience the same problem with any printer, it is not likely to be linked to a specific printer description file, but rather to a general configuration problem with cups or bricscad.

In such a situation, I would create a new user and check if the result is still the same in a 'clean' environment - sorry that I cannot provide more help here...

Tijs Vermeulen

I meanwhile had a look at the blank pages output, in context of support request  67170 added by Marcus.
Enabling "Plot transparencies" causes the empty output.
As far as I know this is a windows-specific feature that accidentally slipped into the mac/linux version.  On windows this option results in using GDI+ instead of GDI.  (GDI+ supports transparencies, plain GDI does not.)   We are discussing internally how to proceed with this option on mac/linux.

About the text scaling issues: as far as I can tell from task history only specific ttf fonts bring scaling issues.  We will investigate which fonts suffer from this, and document the conditions.

Kind Regards
Tijs

Tijs Vermeulen

Meanwhile we have further investigated the text scaling issues during PDF export and responded in the support requests.

The conclusion at the moment is:
on linux/mac, to create a PDF:
- convert ttf text to geometry, by enabling PDFTTFTEXTASGEOMETRY
- disable "Plot transparencies"

A knowledge base article will be created to make the current situation more clear.

To schedule further work it would be useful to learn opinions about these options.
May I assume that at the moment nobody needs "Plot transparencies", and always converting text to geometry is ok for everyone?

Kind Regards
Tijs Vermeulen

Knut Hohenberg

Hello Tijs,
IMO both transparency and working font output ( pfb and otf as well as ttf) are important base functionality and need to be fixed ASAP.
Almost everything I do ends up in pdf, so these limitations are quite annoying...

Clemens Karlhuber

 Hi Tijs,

I am with Knut. Your suggestions do temporarily serve as a workaround for the bug of Bricscad's pdf- engine.

But to assume that no one needs these features, I disagree.

I did tests with pdf writer and it failed printing pdfs with a lot of different hatches.

The Bricscad - pdf - engine did very well, but turned a pdf attached as x-ref into my drawing, into pixel madness.

For now I know what to do and what not to do when working with BricsCad and publishing, but I really would like this issue seen solved as quickly as possible.

Thanks in advance.

Kind regards, Clemens

Tijs Vermeulen

Thanks for the feedback, it is useful!
Proper scaling of text, even if not converting to geometry, will be further treated with priority.

>May I assume that at the moment nobody needs "Plot transparencies", and always converting text to geometry is ok for everyone?
Mind that it was a genuine question.  I had not taken this assumption yet.  Actually my question was a bit backward.  PDF output issues are high priority in general, but I wanted confirmation to avoid spending effort on a potentially unwanted feature.

Before I can tell more about plot transparencies it will be further investigated how much work it would be to also implement it in opengl. (as said it is a new V16 feature implemented in GDI+)

Kind Regards
Tijs