Re: AutoCAD to PDF

[George Mena <George -dot- Mena -at- ESSTECH -dot- COM>]

To answer Tom Mereen's question, I opened AutoCAD LT 97 on my system.
AutoCAD drawings can be saved directly to a URL using LT 97.  PDF conversion
isn't available at the moment in AutoCAD LT 97. What I do with most of my
AutoCAD drawings (they're rather simple, unlike a CAD designer's work) is
export the file as either a *.dxf file or a *.wmf file.  I do this both with
my Word 97 and FrameMaker 5.5 documents.

My Frame-based documents are typically semiconductor data sheets that
include electrical schematics of reference board designs for add-in modem
cards.  These are typically simple drawings:  one layer and basic black for
the colors of all the drawing elements.  I bring these in as *.dxf files
after I've debugged the exported *.dxf files I get from my OrCAD designers.
When I finish and save the final data sheets as PDFs, they're very readable
and the imported schematics print out just fine.

Really watch out for the number of drawing elements and layers present in
the drawing you want to save in PDF format.  Use one layer and the standard
black color only -- no color fills, especially light colors like reds,
yellows and greens -- for best results, especially on a laser printer.

Yesterday (Thursday, 15 Oct 98), I tried to print out two drawings for one
of my MIS guys who'd received a drawing on disk from one of our outside
vendors.  The file was of two drawings in the same file.  I saved two copies
of this two-sheet drawing so that each file had one sheet only.  I then
exported both *.dxf and *.wmf versions of the drawings I edited to my temp
folder so I could dump both of them into both Word and Frame documents.  The
idea was to see which document format would give me better resolution.

As it turned out, neither of them did.  Because the drawings had a lot of
elements, many of them light-colored elements, and a lot of layers, I didn't
get the decent hard-copy resolution I was hoping for, even though I had made
the drawings readable at last via upscaling the drawings.  Only a printer
plotter would've worked, which was the advice I passed on to my MIS
customer.

AutoCAD LT 97 currently allows drawings to be exported to *.bmp, *.eps and
*.wmf formats.  It also allows for export to something known as Drawing Web
Format (*.dwf) and DXX Extract format (*.dxx).  While I haven't tried
exporting a drawing into the *.dwf format yet to see what I sort of
resolution I may get, the versions of Frame and Word on my system here don't
appear to allow this graphics format to be imported into either Frame or
Word-based documents.  Word does, however, allow some graphics to be
converted if it encounters a format it doesn't immediately recognize.  Could
be worth a shot.

Either way, though, keep the AutoCAD drawings simple for best results in a
PDF-based document.

George Mena

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tom Mereen [SMTP:tom -dot- mereen -at- ECTI -dot- COM]
> Sent: Friday, October 16, 1998 9:39 AM
> To:   TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
> Subject:      AutoCAD to PDF
>
> I have some AutoCAD drawings that I need to convert to PDF format. Do I =
> need to save files as BMP, import into Word or Interleaf, and save file =
> as PDF?  ... or can I save directly to PDF?
> Thanks!
>


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