Recommended way to print to PDF?

Martijn van de Rijdt

 I understand this feature is not built-in to BricsCAD. Since there don't seem to be virtual printer solutions available for OS X (probably because OS X has this built-in), I was wondering if anybody knows of a way to print to PDF in OS X.

Thanks in advance!

Tomáš Přibil

 Hello Martin,

In the BRICSCAD just one way how to print to PDF and that is in menu FILE -> EXPORT -> choose file format PDF and SAVE. But final file is little bit bigger then other PDF file created for example via PDF CREATOR in Windows. For example 1.5 MB (BricsCAD PDF) instead 0.1 MB (PDFCreator - WIN PDF)

I try find the better solution for PDF print in MAC similary like famous PDF CREATOR in Windows where is simply possible join multiple source (BricsCad, Word, Excel, etc.) into one PDF file.

If you find in the fututre some solution for better PDF workflow I will be happy ;-)

Marcus Richter

Hi guys, 

but these way also won´t work in the right way.

If you export to pdf, the text will be rescaled in the pdf. So it will be smaller than the original text in your drawing. 

You can enable "pdf TTF text as geometry" in the pdf export options, then it works. But this is just a crude workaround.

Also you can `print` to pdf by using a third party pdf-printer like the pdf-writer.

For more information you can read here: 

https://forum.bricsys.com/discussion/28753

At the moment it´s not possible to print/publish/export pdf´s. That makes bricscad to an expensive useless application for all the people they need their drawings in PDF. Or you looking for someone who is working with bricscad windows or autocad and let him do the pdf-export...

Piotr Czerwinski

 Yeah, it's a shame really. After 1.5 year struggling for off out of Bricscad Mac (after some advice of using Publisher) i just got a Windows on Parallels and have Bullzip and that's it. But you guys from Bricsys should say a truth.

André Luc Warnier

Hi,

I perfectly agree with the previous reactions; I currently test BricsCAD for mac and this missing feature ("print to pdf" from the native mac OS) is really sad.

I also disagree totally with the reflections I've read elsewhere on this forum saying "Export or Publish do the job better" for a evident reason: I often print to pdf only a small part of a big drawing (for example to discuss a detail with a subcontractor) and I don't find the way to publish or export in pdf only a defined window (as you can do with the print menu)... I really hope it will become a TODO for the BricsCAD team!

Andre

JeffKing

I agree with Andre, the ability to print portions of a drawing to pdf is important in my practice also.  But, even more than that, below is what I sent in for a support request:

"I have a printing problem with attached jpegs. I'm using RWTS PDFwriter to allow me to print to larger size sheets than my small format printer driver will. Unfortunately, it will not print the attached jpegs in a drawing. The frame shows if left on, but the image does not. I use the PDFwriter in my page setups, then have to use the export command in order to see the jpgs in the resulting pdf. I've used the PDFwriter to directly print jpegs with no issues, so I suspect that the problem lies with Bricscad.

But then I run into another problem in that if I create a custom paper size in PDFwriter, like Arch E1 42×30, and use the export command, the resulting pdf is the paper size set in the Settings/Export/PDF export/Pdf overridden paper size (210×297), despite the fact that Enable papersize override is not enabled. I can't find a way to control it."

The RWTS PDFwriter is an easy install, and provides a way around some of the inflexibility of the OSX internal pdf writer.

The two biggest problems I have with BCAD are the pdf feature and sudden crashes caused, apparently, by moving large elements (blocks, xrefs, text, etc.)  I do like the program, despite these time wasting issues, and have been pleased with the quick responses of the support team.

Gary Adams

Add me to the list of users wanting native pdf printing in OSX. Virtually every other application I know of (except Acrobat for Mac) allows this.

Regarding PDF Writer, I have used it and like it. I haven't tried large-format page sizes, so I can't comment on how it handles those.

The biggest drawback to me is the inability to set an output path for the finished pdf. It's apparently permanently locked to a subfolder in your Mac user folder, but once you get used to this it's not too much of a problem.

I did see a couple of suggestions in the SourceForge thread that suggested setting the PDF Writer driver to the "LisaNet PDFWriter". Haven't tried this yet either but will do so soon.