Outputing PDF's

[LP]

Steve,
Knowing the proliferation PDF printer drivers on the market now, I wouldn't necessarily expect you to write a driver for your software. One the other hand, if PDF is the industry standard, maybe that output should be available. Knowing the fickleness of computer users though, that might be a hard bill to fill. Maybe, it would be better to package a couple of freebie drivers with your software. I suspect that most people "in the industry" are already familiar with these resources and it's the amatuer/hobbyist that gets caught unaware.

[LP]

PDF and TIFF are the only formats they accept.

[marshmat]

Maybe it's just your print shop.... but I find that very, very strange indeed.
Most commercial print shops around here (all the honest ones at least) can handle the full range of Adobe formats (pdf, psd, indd, etcetera), as well as all common graphics formats, and if they do engineering drawings, can usually take DXF/DWG as well. A print shop that can only take two formats strikes me as an odd thing indeed.
Having said that, there are indeed plenty of free PDF converters that work just fine. I like Acrobat 7 (not free) but the PDF file format itself is well known now and is natively embedded in many popular programs, Corel Office X3 being one of the best known. Make sure if you get a free add-on one that it doesn't "watermark" your drawings with its own logo!
Virtually all PDF generators work as a sort of 'virtual printer'. You click Print as you would to print on paper, and you select the PDF printer instead of your normal printer. It asks you about what quality you want to publish at, and off it goes. Not at all hard, with any of them.

[Man Overboard]

The reason a print shop might only take PDF or Tiff images, is because it is very difficult for their customers to screw up the preflight with those output formats. In addition they don't have to have purchased a lot of fonts, because by nature, the fonts are embedded within the file. I take it that this print shop is small, probably working short handed. Although other print shops may take many other formats, be aware that someone has to preflight those files. In most cases there is someone in house that takes a look at the file and makes sure that everything is going to print as you expect. Even when there is someone in house checking your preflight, there may be a disclaimer that places the responsibility of all or a portion of preflight on your shoulders. If you are only printing a couple of copies, probably no big deal, but if you are doing a big run, it can be an expensive mistake if for say, some of your overlays don't print the way they should. If you aren't familiar with what an overlay is, then you probably should be sending PDF or TIFF files to your print shop, or make sure your print shop is preflighting before printing.

[Tim B]

Take an A4 copy of the drawing when you go in. Then it makes it easier to check that you've got what you should have.

Tim B.

[Raggi_Thor]

Originally Posted by Tim B

I have to smile at windows needing 3rd party software to handle Postscript and PDF. I'm used to being able to print to one or the other in Linux. Very easy, and seamless to the user.
Tim B.

I am not a particular fan of Wiindows or MS, but there is no need to smile :-)
You can of course use Ghostscript and other free stuff on Windows if you want to, but I prefer to pay 39 dollars for something that saves several mouse clicks every time I need to email a pdf from any program. You can make things like this yourself, but why bother when someone else has?

[Tim B]

I said 3rd Party, not proprietry. PDFs are something I've had a look at producing under M$ windows, but got so fed up with it I decided to do it all on the Linux server. Some things are just so easy on Linux that I sometimes forget they can be difficult on windows. It's always good to be reminded.

Cheers,

Tim B.

[Raggi_Thor]

I don't know why, You just make me want to tease you :-)

What can be simpler than pressing Ctrl+P and then Enter in all my programs to make a pdf, get it up for a preview in Acrobat, and in a new email message ready to send???
That's two keystrokes, can you do it faster in TimCad forTimux?

[Grant Nelson]

Doesn't AutoCad have a 'Plot to PDF' option - so check out via the plot manager to see if that is one of the plotters offered...

[terhohalme]

This one does your *.pdf files easy from any Windows based software.

http://www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp

Load and install cutePDF writer AND converter.

[Raggi_Thor]

Terho(?),
If you have the time, does CutePDF suggest the same filename for the pdf as the original (Drawing1.dwg -> Drawing1.pdf, Doc1.doc -> Doc1.pdf) and does it "remember" the last output foolder for each application?
Can it allways place the pdf in the same location as the original?

If you make pdfs all the time I find that each click counts, and browsing fro folders takes a lot of time.

[Steve Baer]

I tested a lot of these PDF printer applications this last year (CutePDF, NitroPdf, Pdf995, Abode Acrobat). They all worked very well for creating CAD style prints. The only drawback was that I seem to remember there was a size limit for the paper you could make a PDF for (but maybe I'm just confused).

[Raggi_Thor]

Win2Pdf and (of course?) Adobe can "plot" to A0, A1 and so on and a number of user specific sizes. You can make a long A1 for exampla if the print shop uses paper on rolls.

[Grant Nelson]

I checked it out and oth AutoCAD 2007 and AutoCAD LT 2007 can output to Adobe PDF format.