Drafting v12 Includes PDF Printing

[John Scheffel]

There was some discussion recently in this thread (http://www.cocreateusers.org/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=140) about printing all the sheets in an Annotation drawing to single PDF file using Win2PDF. Well here's an interesting twist. I just started testing Drafting v12, went to the What's New (http://apps.cocreate.com/exploreme10/) page, and found that Drafting v12 now has built in PDF printing support. It also has improved support for printing the current sheet or all sheets of an Annotation drawing. I tried using the new "All Sheets" option to print a multi page Annotation drawing with the built in PDF support. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it printed all the sheets to a single PDF file with one click of the OK button. I haven't done too much testing, but so far these new features seem to work great.

As far as I can tell, there is no comparable feature in Annotation v12, the Plot menus seem unchanged. Kind of ironic that printing all the sheets of an Annotation drawing is now easier in Drafting than it is in Annotation. Drafting will print all the sheets in one shot, Annotation still opens Print Manager for each sheet if you set Output to Drawing. Drafting also provides printing to the clipboard, HPGL, and right click printing of MI files, all features not included with Annotation.

I don't know if any of the Drafting developers follow this forum since we don't hear much from them, but if so, thanks for some very handy enhancements.

[May Kung]

Wow. The irony is we are still *gasp* using ME10 8.70 here. When we finally migrate to OSD12, I wonder if I can persuade management to look into upgrading ME10? Printing PDF files easily would be a godsend to our Document Control group.

Definitely sounds promising, John.

[John Scheffel]

I had time to do some more testing and found a few issues.

If the drawing consists of different size frames and you set the scale to Fit, it will use the same scaling factor for all the sheets based on the largest sheet. This means the smaller frames will not fill the page. This happens printing to either PDF or a printer.

Also, the sheets from an Annotation drawing may not end up in the order you would expect in the resulting PDF file. For example, I expected that page 1 of the PDF would be sheet 1, page 2 would be sheet 2, etc. It came out this way on the first file I tried, but not on the second. There may have been something unusual about how the second drawing was created, but it was an example of a production drawing. I suspect it is keying on the "Unique Part Number" of each sheet rather than the sheet number to set the order, but haven't run enough tests to verify this.

Edited Nov 12, 2003 - Removed comment about right click Print of Annotation drawing files outputting all sheets overlaid. I'm not sure why it did not work in my first test, it may have been interaction with customizations. Later testing of right click Print did print all sheets one per page.

So far the new PDF printing feature works great, the resulting PDFs looks sharp and if printed from Acrobat look identical to prints directly from Drafting.

The new print "All Sheets" option is a big step in the right direction, but needs some enhancement. The most important issue is the scaling of each sheet when they are not all the same size. Each sheet should fill the page it is printed to when Fit is selected, regardless of the size of other sheets. As an extreme example, if you have a drawing with both A and E size frames, the A size ends up printing pretty small (see the attached PDF)

[gmatelich]

It would also be cool if the text were selectable searchable text rather than raster image.

[May Kung]

Finally got a chance to try this out myself and I must say, I like how nicely it produces PDF files. I had the same problem John reported with sheets ending up in an odd order on occasion, though. Still investigating.