PDFCreator

Peter Bontekoe
Peter Bontekoe
in Other

Hello,

 

When i am printing to PDF with PDFCreator most of the numbers 1 and 7 are bright. (see the attached file)

Direct printing to the HP Designjet there is almost no difference. I have tried several fonts, but nothing seems to help.

Can anybody explain what’s going wrong?

 

Best regards.

Peter

Comments

  • Richard Webb
    Richard Webb
     The glyphs which appear lighter are vector objects while the darker ones are bitmaps. See attached screen capture. The bitmap objects are necessarily "lumpy" and that makes them look darker. I don't recall whether PDFCreater has a control to adjust the resolution of bitmap objects but if so, that might be a quick fix.

    As to why PDFCreator renders some characters as vector objects and some as bitmaps, I have no clue. I would suggest trying the built-in Publish facility in BricsCAD instead. I find that it works pretty well.

    Note: the screen capture below is, of course, purely a bitmap since it was, well, captured from the screen. Zoom in sufficiently on the original PDF and the difference between the two renderings should be obvious.
    imagenew-1.JPG
  • Roy Klein Gebbinck
    Roy Klein Gebbinck
    Make sure that the width factor for all TTF font texts is 1. This also means do not use the 'Fit' justification.
  • David Waight
    David Waight
    Peter,

    If you open your pdf in acrobat reader (or probably any pdf reader and do a find (normally Ctrl F) you will notice that most of your words are not text, but vectors.

    Only 1, 7 and x in your drawing are actually text.

    Parts of your title block which you have filled in are text but everything else is just vectors that look like text.

    I don't use PDF Creator, so I don't know what causes this, but hopefully this will point you in a direction.

    Incidentally is there a reason why you don't use Bricscad's built in PDF facility?

    Hope this helps.
  • Anthony Apostolaros
    Anthony Apostolaros
    It's not just a matter of the 1's and 7's printing lighter. For example, in the upper left, both characters in the text string "1A" are lighter than both characters in "1B" and "2A" below that. The "1" in "1A" is also lighter than the first "1" in "1x2x1mm" (but the second "1" is light). Parts of the first "m" are lighter than the corresponding parts of the second.

    The text strings that printed lightly can be searched for or selected in Acrobat, and their curves are smooth no matter how far I zoom in. The other text strings are apparently bitmap renderings of the characters, since they're grainy when I zoom in and they can't be searched for or selected.

    I don't understand why PDF Creator rendered some of the text entities as text and some as bitmaps. Can you find some difference in the way you created those text entities? On my system, SHX fonts are usually converted to bitmaps, whereas TTF fonts are always rendered as searchable text in the PDF file.

    Also, have you tried a different PDF printer? I've never noticed a problem with PDF Creator, but there are many other very good free PDF printers, such as Cute, Nitro, Foxit, and reDirect.


  • Peter Bontekoe
    Peter Bontekoe
     I did not know about the command publish/PDF. That works perfect !!

    Thanks a lot !!
    Peter
  • Joe Dunfee
    Joe Dunfee
     I have V14, and had to abandon the use of the internal export to PDF, because my embedded spreadsheets printed extremely pixelated.  Printing to PDF Creator generated much better results. So, at least in v14, it depends on the stuff you have in the drawings.

    I have never seen the issue you are having with some characters as vector and others as pixels.

    -Joe
  • Jason Bourhill
    Jason Bourhill
    Export to PDF has continued to improve since V14, and has a lot more options that the user can be configure. Embedded spreadsheets get printed as an image, to improve their quality you can increase the value of PdfImageDPI (default = 300) in SETTINGS. Attach some samples, one printed at 100dpi, the other at 600dpi. You see a very noticeable improvement at the higher dpi.

    An alternative with Spreadsheets is to do a paste special (PASTESPEC), then select the XML Spreasheet option. This will paste the data in as a TABLE.

    Regards,
    Jason Bourhill

    Publish-XLS-600dpi.pdfPublish-XLS-100dpi.pdf

    imageV16-PdfExportOptions.jpg
This discussion has been closed.