Importing PDF drawings and plotting them..

[Anonymous]

I am trying to lay out a bunch of notes and details on a layout in AC 10, but for some reason the PDF drawing with the notes on it wont plot out, despite it being on a printable layer. Everything else prints fine, just not the PDF imports. Is there some setting that needs to be checked over for this to work?

-=PD=-

[Gerald Hoffman]

I just had something like this happen to me if I read your post correctly. I had made up PLT files to send from the sheets with pdf imports. Some of the sheets were fine and some were missing the pdfs. I finally just made PDF files of the sheets and they were all fine. I don't know what the problem is but this might work as a workaround.

Cheers,

[Anonymous]

Are you saying you printed the sheets with PDF imports on them into a PDF format? I had actually tried plotting to a PDF earlier to circumvent the problem, but i had the same result. Everthing done in AC would show up fine, the PDF of the notes i brought in would not be on the sheet.

Our design group is kind of running out of easy options, since the idea to plot stuff out of AutoCAD into a PDF format and bring them into AC that way was the result of massive headaches with directly translating the autocad files.

-=PD=-

[Djordje]

Paul wrote:
Are you saying you printed the sheets with PDF imports on them into a PDF format? I had actually tried plotting to a PDF earlier to circumvent the problem, but i had the same result. Everthing done in AC would show up fine, the PDF of the notes i brought in would not be on the sheet.

Our design group is kind of running out of easy options, since the idea to plot stuff out of AutoCAD into a PDF format and bring them into AC that way was the result of massive headaches with directly translating the autocad files.

-=PD=-

What was it exactly that you have tried to do?

What is your OS and version?

Did you try printing?

What was the DWG export problem?

[Anonymous]

I had this happen to me too. Only some PDF's wont plot though. Others would plot fine. Not sure why yet. Maybe a version conflict of the PDF?

[Anonymous]

I have just had the same issue and wonder if it is related to the last patch. All of my structural drawings are PDF's placed on a layout sheet for output. Previously I had output in this means without incidence. Now those sheets show up blank when output via publisher to a PDF format. I suppose a work around would be to convert all of those PDF's to JPEG, but that does not seem ideal. Please list your platform you are working on and the patch version of Archicad you are running to see is we can narrow this down. I will try to output to a PC I have which I believe does not have the latest patch installed.

[Anonymous]

I have run a few tests to try and resolve this issue. First I tried to embed the PDF files. This had no effect and the output PDF's were still blank. Next I opened the project on a PC which has not been updated with the latest patch (running on version 1010). This corrected my output issues so I have a work around for my immediate needs. I am now hesitant to update my PC with the latest patch. Are there any Mac users running Archicad with the latest patch (1176) who could test this issue? I don't know if it is platform specific so I ask the same question of PC users. If this is a bug it is major and we should get it reported to Graphisoft ASAP.

[Anonymous]

Its very strange. I rendered the PDFs out to JPGs and imported them THAT way, but to the same result. Even the imported JPG imaged wont print on my layout.

BTW: Im running AC 10 1183 on XP Pro

-=PD=-

[Anonymous]

I have tried few other tests to try and narrow down this issue. The issue seems to be related to the size of the PDF relative to the printable area of the PDF sheet. If I resize the PDF file such that it is less than the printable area, I get expected output. You can't just "crop" the view but need to resize the drawing. This of course becomes an issue for scaled drawings. This is clearly something new since I was not having these issues before my update to 1176 or my system update to 10.4.9. If I place a smaller PDF file such that it's boundaries fall outside of the the printable area there are no problems. It seems to be directly related to the actual size of the PDF file and the printable area in the layout sheet. Setting the printing margins to zero allowed me to place a sheet and output as intended. I recall a similar issue back in the plotmaker days of having to set the printer margins to zero, but I can't recall all of the specifics. Hopefully this is not an old monster returning to haunt us.

[Anonymous]

Paul, I noticed that I am not running the most recent patch since you indicated your version as 1183. I think I will download the latest patch and try that out. I don't think I will update my version 1010 on my PC. It is very frustrating when a patch apparently "breaks" something that was working correctly.