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PDF Settings....WF 5.0

GregFrankland
2-Guest

PDF Settings....WF 5.0

Does anyone know of a way to control the settings in WF5.0 drawing ribbon Publish tab for PDF files?

I guess that I have two questions regarding this....

1) Is there a config option or something similar that allows me to set default preferences under the settings for PDF?

2) It seems as though I have to click on the settings button to get the settings to take effect on the next PDF even thought the values are set from the previous publish. What I mean by this is that we use the stroke all fonts option so that the text looks like the actual printed version of the drawing. Unless I go into the settings tab and click the content tab and ok, it still defaults to using the true type fonts even though when I bring up the dialogue box it already has stroke all fonts selected. Has anyone else seen this or better yet know how to keep from having to do this?

Thanks,

-Greg


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14 REPLIES 14
GrahameWard
5-Regular Member
(To:GregFrankland)

I'd like to know this too. To be fair the settings didn't stay put in earlier releases either, although I had a freakin' mapkey that did it for me!

On the question of PDFs.... if I make a PDF of a drawing in WF4.0, then open the same drw and export it in WF5.0 the PDFs look different. Yes, same settings.

You will find the config options either listed as intf2d_out... , intf_pdf... , or pdf... when using the Find tool in the options.

Specifically the Stroke all fonts is intf2d_out_stroke_text.

Hope that helps.

David

GrahameWard
5-Regular Member
(To:DHLewis)

Thanks, I tried

intf2d_out_stroke_text

I didn't do anything. I'm guessing that just sets the PDF output settings to "stroke all fonts" as default. We need to use true type fonts for our title block and besides the PDF output has changed in the line appearances, not the fonts. I tried all your other possibilities for config options but nothing else came up.

Here is a screen capture of a drawing (confidential info blanked out). The right side was outputted from 4.0 into PDF and the left was outputted from 5.0 into PDFD using the exact same settings.

Greg,

I you use the "Find..." button on the Options dialog, and input the items I mentioned before you will find all the other options available (See image). Based on your sample it looks like a pen table issue too. See pdf_use_pentable.

Also if you search for "ttf" you will find ttf_handling_for_plot_files. I don't know if this will help as I have not used it in the past but looks like it might be worth trying.

David.

Grahame,

I agree with David. With what I can tell from the JPG file, the issue I see with the thicker lines on the WF5.0 file appears to be related to the pdf_use_pentable. Using this option set to yes, and having suitable pentable in place should help with the thickness of the lines.

David,

I added following options to my current session config.pro:

intf2d_out_stroke_text ALL

ttf_handling_for_plot_files STROKE ALL FONTS

I then proceeded to create a PDF file without changing settings in the settings tab (which is what I am after) and the PDF file still seems to be using a true type font for the text even though the text is using just the default font in the drawing.

It seems as if these settings are independent of these config options.

Thank you for the help thus far!

-Greg

Hello all,

I thought that I would share the best solution I was able to find. So here it is:

I found on the knowledge base the following article:

https://www.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS21152

It tells me that I am not able to make changes to the default profile for saving a PDF file through the publish tab in WF5.0. It says that I can create a profile and enter a config option "intf_profile_dir" to point to that profile so that it is available whenever I am working on a drawing, but I am not able to push that as the default profile, I still have to select it when generating the PDF file.

It also mentioned creating a mapkey to create a PDF file with the profile so that it will simplify the creation of PDF files. being familiar with mapkeys, I was able to generate the mapkey and add an icon in the file toolbar so that it is available with any active tab in the drawing ribbon interface.

So now it is now possible to turn off my datum fetaures and generate a PDF file with my custom profile settings in my pdf file location all with just once click of the icon I created. Turns out to be a rather slick solution to the problem.

For those that may be unfamiliar with mapkeys, here is the link for more information about them: http://www.ptc.com/cs/cs_26/howto/fun453/fun453.htm

Thanks again for everyone's input!

-Greg

GrahameWard
5-Regular Member
(To:GregFrankland)

Greg,

We already have a pen table specified in our config.pro, along with a path to it with the option:

pen_table_file ..PATH\prostart\table.pnt

Like I said, this hasn't changed since 4.0, actually since our installation of 3.0. We did a lot of messing around with the pen table to get the look we want, it worked fine, didn't change anything, migrated all our settings to the 5.0 location, and now the line weights are different.

Actually I think it's only geometry lines (pen 1). Here's what the pen table looks like:

!pen 1 thickness .010 in
pen 2 thickness .001 in
pen 3 thickness .001 in
pen 4 thickness .018 in
pen 5 thickness .015 in
pen 6 thickness .012 in
pen 7 thickness .001 in

As you can see pen 1 is commented out. It used to be set to .010" but we need it to go to the default setting because we use pen 1 in our format and want the line weight to be heavier in some of the format lines. That way it does not ignore the overridden thickness. I repeat: this is what we did in 4.0 and 3.0 and it worked fine then.

I can only assume the default line weight for pen 1 has for some bizarre reason been changed in 5.0. Does anyone know if this default setting can be changed?

Grahame,

Just to clarify, do you have the config.pro setting pdf_use_pentable assigned to yes in your current configuration?

If not it seems that the PDF publisher has some other way of assigning pen thickness values which may not be desirable.

If you do have it set to yes, then I am not sure what the issue may be.

Just wondering,

-Greg

GrahameWard
5-Regular Member
(To:GregFrankland)

Yes.

Having said that I have outputted PDFs with the "Use Pentable" button checked and unchecked and the output looks the same both ways. That would imply that my path to the table.pnt is incorrect but I have checked that and it is not.

I agree the problem seems to be with the PDF publisher. Some one from PTC should be able to confirm this.

The only alternative explanation would be that the default lineweight assignation has changed for pen1. If there is a file somewhere under the load point that sets this it would be nice to know. In the meantime our PDFs look bad....

Thanks for confriming that. Like you, I have noticed that the check box on the PDF publish dialogue doesn't seem to have any affect, and that is why I was asking about the config.pro option.

Not sure where to go from here?

Sorry I couldn't resolve your issue. If you do find the solution please post here, because I am sure that you are not the only one with this issue.

-Greg

GrahameWard
5-Regular Member
(To:GregFrankland)

Thanks for your input. I will take this to PTC, they may as well do something for the annual maitenence! I will just need to get all my ducks in a row regarding all the relevant files and settings so they don't talk me through things that I have already tried.

Hi Grahame,

Thanks for your efforts on this. Have not looked at the Planet PTC Community for a few days so did not notice this discussion.

I have been having my fith go at trying to get internal PDF creation working properly (started back in WF4 more than two years ago). Every time I get a bit of time out from project work to look at this it seems I have to relearn everything again. There seem to be several things that affect internal PDF output and getting them all right at the same time... well I have not managed it yet. I am back to the stage where I understand my updated formats and use of TT fonts (Arial) but have fallen at the line weight hurdle. That bit about being able to save and call up a PDF configuration setting was doing my head in. I even searched for the Default setting file but nothing showed up. Most recent thing is that when trying to sort all this out I realise that I have to have my templates and formats on a network drive otherwise when I start making a drawing it uses the template part as well as the part I have open. So many variables. Of course Help isn't; i only get little pieces of the puzzle and those not always making sense.

Ah well more real work to do so the recently required knowledge is already starting to slip away. Get to keep on using a PDF creator installed as a printer.

Regards,

Brent Drysdale

I created an idea for this and it evolved a couple times.

Essentially, you can create a settings file, but there's no way to call it into Pro/E yet.

http://communities.ptc.com/ideas/1704

Any chance this idea would ever come to being?

Could anyone who cares at least a bit please vote it up?

Thanks.

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