Exporting CAD for desktop publishing

[Anonymous]

Could anyone give advice on how best to export/process CAD files for use within desktop publishing programmes, AND achieve fine print quality of the sort seen in the journals.

I'm familiar (ish) with using EPS, although I use Illustrator to create an EPS with a preview before importing to Quark. I'm trying in vain to achieve the fine line quality that I see in the architectural press i.e. being able to show LEGIBLE plans at 1:500 or even smaller. Is there a trick to processing the file to achieve hairlines in DTP.

In some cases I think that a rasterized EPS saved as TIFF is giving a better print, but that can't be right can it? Prints are outputted (?) on a EPS capable printer at a local print bureau.

Perhaps it is just a case of removing some of the information from my 1:100 plans so as to make them more legible and avoid line convergence. If that's the case then I suppose I'm looking for a lazyboy workaraound.

Any tips would be appreciated. (I'm a complete novice with illustrator, so all I can do at the moment is open then save back as Illustrator EPS to give me the preview image. I'm more than willing to learn!)

[stefan]

You have to prepare the plan settings in ArchiCAD, so you can see the correct display of lines, hatches, fills etc....
(Without this preparation, any conversion will give garbage)

Then you could export to PDF, which you can open in Illustrator as well.

Or export a hidden line rendering into a vectorial drawing.

[tsturm]

for a 1:500 file to print clearly you need to simplify your plan. Shut off all fills. Reduce all doors and windows to single lines.

Do not use composite walls.

Print out as EPS file or save as Postscript file. Then check in Illustrator that the line weights are hairlines. then print the file out on Postscript printer to see if the lines are coming out as thin as you want.

The key thing to remember through it all is the number of lines and their thicknesses or weights.

Using raster files such as JPEG and TIFF are not scaleable without data loss. DO NOT be confused by Photoshops ability. If you scale a raster image you WILL alter the data. If you use EPS, a vector drawing format, you can scale the drawing until you are blue in the face and not lose any data. Your output will appear to change because as you scale the drawing the line weights do not change to compensate. If you want to go very small then change the line weights to very small or you will get mud.

Think of the rapidio pens wasting away in your drawer. You would never use a 1 pen to draw super fine detail you would use the 000 pen.

HTH

[stefan]

You can perfectly import EPS or PDF into Photoshop if you want, but then you have to decide on the output resolution (and don't change it anymore, unless by a whole percentage: e.g. 200% 50% (it may work reasonably on 25% 33,333% etc...).

Then you can use whatever trick there is in the Photoshop filters to get to where you want.

To my surprise, a lot of drawing work for magazines, which starts as Vectorial, is completely finished as bitmap-data in tools like Photoshop. Once you have the final resolution, you can freely stay there and modify at will. But do not scale/resize...