Acroplot vs. Bluebeam

[david_massingale]

Hi. I am considering one of these two products, and was wondering if anyone can give me some insight as to which is better and why. I have downloaded and tried both, and am leaning toward Acroplot. Bluebeam has problems with textmasks unless I switch to the alternate driver that they supply. I think most people use textmasks, so why not just use the driver that handles them?

I would appreciate any comments

[bbapties]

The only thing that I can comment on is that Ive only tried Acroplot. and it works great when It works.. Our department started calling it Acrosucks cause it seemed like it locked up alot when creating multiple page pdf's... my two cents...
but other than locking up I really liked it. It also had a good compression rate on the pdf file size output.

[rclayton]

We use bluebeam, but we do not do alot of text masking. We do alot of Line Merging however and it works fine. It also creates PDFs from ALL our other applications like MS Office, Photoshop, and Illustrator so we do not have to have Acrobat for PDF creation.

I have not had a problem with the few text masks I have tried, but I use the Bluebeam System Printer instead of the built in translators for AutoCAD. I have also had good luck with getting support from bluebeam whenever I have had a problem.

I have never used Acroplot personally, so I cant make a comparison.

[david_massingale]

I appreciate the info. So far, both work well. Bluebeam has several methods of line merge, but I really only care about making the PDFs look like our plots. Acroplot seems to only have one way of making line merges, but it does it the way I want.

[bgolden87577]

I've tried both and was satisfied with the production quality of both. AcroPlot has a huge advantage in file size. A drawing with an image attached produced a 10mb PDF with Bluebeam and several other PDF writers. AcroPlot shrunk it down to 1mb. Enormous size difference. My only problem with AcroPlot was getting a screened pen to plot from a 1055 correctly.

[rmcmanamy.53489]

In AcroPlot we also have all of the options for lines merge they are just hidden up under the Setup->Change Setup Options and then on the PDF Tab. But in all honesty Darken is the best one to use. Multiply would give you the best results normally but there is a chance that the Adobe Reader will display balck*black as white under certain conditions. So we default it to the Darken. The different modes are actually defined by the PDF format and we were the first ones to create the PDF with lines merge and originally only gave the Darken output because that was the best one in all of our testing. But then Bluebeam marketed all of the different modes so we had to allow it also.

As for the lockups I apologize and we have some customers doing 500+ drawings at a time with no problem. We have recently optimized the image conversion even more and if you had specific embedded images in the drawings that was probably the cause. I think it was mainly related to monochrome images where the high bit was black instead of white (would still display as normal in AutoCAD though) and the transparency in AutoCAD was set to On or something like that. The downfall of trying to compress the file size so much is slighlty longer processing and in this case is was just a wrong assumption by the programmer on how to optimize the image. But that was just resolved last week so you might want to try to download the latest version from the website. If you still have problems contact me at rmcmanamy@cadzation.com and if you want to send us the files we'll gladly run them on some of our machines to see if we can recreate the problem.

They are both great programs and ours is a bit harder to use at first because of all of the different features we have but that's what sets us apart. Our customer's love being able to extract out the titleblock attributtes for the bookmarks and we have a couple major things for this summer that I think are really going to rock. But you're not going wrong with either one of them.

[irdugdale]

I have been looking at acroplot pro demo and it has worked well in my tests.
I've not used bluebeam.

I'm looking for a program to watch a folder and convert dwg files to pdf files, as and when they appear, and add a water mark.
[adobe distiller does this but only for PostScript files]

Are there any programs available to do this?

Many Thanks

[Mike.Perry]

I'm looking for a program to watch a folder and convert dwg files to pdf files, as and when they appear, and add a water mark.
[adobe distiller does this but only for PostScript files]

Are there any programs available to do this?

Hi

I believe Bluebeam Conversion Server has that functionality...

Have a good one, Mike

[willm.86644]

AcroPlot Auto will watch a folder(s), convert your files, name them, and then place the output file in the same or any other folder. It can also FTP the output file and create a JPG or BMP thumbnail.

The way the conversion works is you convert a file with AcroPlot Pro. Once you get your settings dialed in for the way you want the conversion done you can apply those setting to a specific folder(s) in AcroPlot Auto. Some firms that are currently using AcroPlot Auto have it scheduled to run every night at 2 am and convert every DWG to either PDF or DWF that was modified that day. Then when it is time to release a set for plan check or bidding, only a few DWG's need to be re-converted and the project set is out the door with little effort. Other companies have it tied in with their PLM as the DWG to PDF rendering engine.

AcroPlot Auto is scheduled for official release in mid August, but you can get an evaluation and pre-release pricing.

We have already installed it at over 30 companies and internally we have pushed over 1 million files through it from conversion services/projects for clients that don't have the time to do large amounts of file conversions.

The main thing to remember is to get the output from AcroPlot Pro the way you want it. Then AcroPlot Auto will convert your files the same way.