Workarounds for implementing Line Overwrite in PDF's

[ccaron]

Probably should be in Plotting, or should it... :P

Issue: Print Processing PDF's with Line Merge tranparencies becoming hinderance, sometime it just times out.

So our options are: suffer with line merge or switch to the line overwrite band wagon.

I'm all for line overwrite, but we have alot of infrastructer that needs to be updated. Anyone come up with a quick easy to implement method of correcting draw order issue? Preferably free from possible human error.

[irneb]

Nope. The overwrite's the only sure-fire way to know what the recipient's got is what you send them. Merging in PDF's never been good, the best way I've found thus far is to use PDF Creator instead of ACad's built-in Dwg2Pdf (or for that matter any other PDF Printer like CutePDF) - but even then you sometimes still have issues (e.g. some PDF Viewers ignore the merge and either only displays it correctly and/or worse: prints it wrong). Else you could use PDF Creator's save to PNG/JPG so it's actually a raster image - transparency seems to work correctly then (no matter what the recipient uses to open it), unfortunately the filesize is generally much larger though.

So for me, you're stuck with overwrite. And all attempts to make draw-order automatic only goes so far (e.g. some lisps allow to set draw-order per layer).

These days I use Revit much more, at least there draw-order is much less of an issue (unless you place solid filled regions with transparency).