If you want to make a drawing available over the internet, PDF is the most popular way of doing it and it is being recognised as a standard.
The File and Selection file save menus now have a PDF file option (function numbers 496 and 497). These will save the drawing directly as a PDF version 1.3 file with the following properties and limitations:
All drawing, excluding outline font text and pixel images, should export as well as it does for a Draw file.
Outline font text:
Text in the following fonts will be output as for Draw:
| Corpus.Medium Corpus.Bold Corpus.Bold.Oblique Corpus.Medium.Oblique Homerton.Medium Homerton.Bold Homerton.Bold.Oblique Homerton.Medium.Oblique Trinity.Bold Trinity.Bold.Italic Trinity.Medium.Italic Trinity.Medium Dingbats* Selwyn Sidney |
Fonts other than these will be rendered as outlines and may not look as good, and therefore should be avoided. (This may be improved in future versions.) * The EFF dingbats font will only export correctly where it matches Selwyn.
Pixel images:
Only JPEGs will be output. Sprites, GIFs, Bitmaps and EMFs will be ignored without error.
File Information:
Five new buttons have been added to the File Information box. These permit the user to select what extra information should be exported with the PDF file. Creator is exported as Author as the creator in this context is ProCAD+. The Drawing number is exported as the Subject. The dates are exported in international format to assist in searching. The PDF viewing software will usually show the dates in a more user-friendly format.
File compression:
All files will be compressed using 'Flate' compression unless they contain JPEGs greater than 32K in size, in which case the non-JPEG code will be left uncompressed. The new PDFCOMP parameter defaults to 1 but can be set to 0 to disable compression for debugging purposes. Occasionally the compressor gives an error -4. This is usually an insufficient memory error.
A PDF file may be dropped onto a fresh ProCAD+ window or the iconbar icon to load it. There are a few types that won’t load. Very early PDF (version 1 or 2 files) and encrypted files are not supported and only ‘flate’ compression is recognised.
