Tip: Cheap PDF Printing For Drawings

[John Scheffel]

If you want to print your drawings to PDF files so that you can send them to others, you might want to checkout some of the PDF print drivers that are available. Most are shareware and can be purchased for much less than Adobe Acrobat. They don't do everything that Acrobat can do, but duplicate the function of the included "PDF Writer" printer driver that comes with Acrobat. Some have more features than PDF Writer.

A few months back we evaluated several PDF print drivers. Most had issues with printing drawings from Annotation and ME10 (line thickness or margin problems). Two that worked well were pdfFactory (www.fineprint.com) and Win2PDF (www.daneprairie.com). pdfFactory has the most features and costs $50 for a single license. Win2PDF is simpler, but has the essentials and does a good job at $35 for a single license.

We went with Win2PDF since it is much cheaper for volume license purchase. We have worked with Dane Prairie and they were very responsive fixing a few minor problems relating to the precision of the line width, which can be an issue if you are using the PDFs for artwork. These fixes should benefit others who use Win2PDF with Annotation and ME10.

If you have found other PDF printing options that work well for you, please post them here. Here are some other PDF resources.

www.planetpdf.com
www.pdfzone.com

[May Kung]

Thanks for the information on PDF file creation, John. We finally purchased seats of the Win2PDF software for users here to make PDF files from Annotation.

Do you have any suggestions on easily printing multi-sheet Annotation drawings? As it stands, using Append still requires naming a new PDF for each successive sheet, so a 6 sheet drawing becomes 6 PDF files, with the last one containing all 6 sheets in order.

[Yannick Rouat]

A other possibility :
PDFCreator who is GNU General Public License (GPL).

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

[John Scheffel]

Originally posted by May Kung
Do you have any suggestions on easily printing multi-sheet Annotation drawings? As it stands, using Append still requires naming a new PDF for each successive sheet, so a 6 sheet drawing becomes 6 PDF files, with the last one containing all 6 sheets in order.
I haven't found an easy way to do it, but you can append all the sheets to a single file without creating mulitple files. See the attached web archive file (download and view with IE) for the technique plus other tips on using Win2PDF from Drafting and Annotation.

We do have a process to print all the sheets in a drawing file to PDF with a single operation using Drafting 11.6, but it produces a separate PDF file for each sheet. I had some discussions with their support people about improving the append/prepend options so it would be possible to automate printing all the sheets in a drawing to a single file. They seemed receptive but I'm not sure what happened to this effort. The last message I received indicated that the author was tied up with something else but would investigage it later. That was back in May of 2003. We are running a special version compiled for Agilent at that time, but it is equivalent to 2.10 which is the current version on their web site. So it looks like there have been no major enhancements since May 2003.

[May Kung]

I was running 2.12 earlier, but just downloaded (and installed) 2.25, the latest release from their site. Using Append and Overwrite only seems to work for up to 2 consecutive sheets. If I try doing this with a drawing that contains more than 2 sheets, only the last two sheets are in the file.

Perhaps I'm missing a setting. Thanks for the web archive file, BTW. It was quite informative. :)

[John Scheffel]

Originally posted by May Kung
Using Append and Overwrite only seems to work for up to 2 consecutive sheets. If I try doing this with a drawing that contains more than 2 sheets, only the last two sheets are in the file.
Hmmm. I just tried a 5 sheet drawing and see the same thing. I could swear I tried this process before with at least 3 sheets and it worked, but I can't do it now. So it looks like you do have to create a new file name each time you append a sheet. I will have to fix my web page.