DWF Quality

[Batman]

It seems as though when printing to DWF from Revit the quality is nothing as good as printing to DWF from AutoCAD. When you zoom in on some finer details the Revit DWF seems to be nothing more than an image unlike the AutoCAD DWF counterpart which seems to be made up of vectors.

Is there anyway of improving the quality of Revit DWF's??

[Chad Smith]

This is a know issue that is yet to be addressed by Autodesk.

It is also one of 2 reasons why I don't currently use, promote or recommend DWF to others.

[tc3dcad60731]

I agree that there is a visual difference when you are looking at colorized iso views etc. Otherwise, I see no difference and use DWF all of the time with no negative comments from my clients.

[Chad Smith]

The difference is that DWF's render raster images atrociously slow to the screen.
If I have no choice as to how Revit is outputing the views, I'd rather use PDF's, since they are nice and quick to view.

[greg.mcdowell]

Probably not the answer you want to hear but... don't zoom in... at least past 100%. <grin>

The way I see it the purpose of a DWF (or PDF for that matter) is to digitally record what I would normally print. As long as what I see on screen at 100% looks like (or pretty close to) what I print then I'm not worried if, should I zoom in to 400% or so, it looses resolution.

I haven't done much digging with this yet (I do agree that what I get in Revit doesn't seem to look as good on screen as my AutoCAD/ADT stuff did in a DWF) but I suspect the issue is related to how Revit treats hatch patterns (excuse me... fill patterns). It would seem that it treats these as raster information instead of vector... and I would guess that this is most noticeable with drafting patterns and not with model patterns. If I'm right then it's not only acceptable it's what I would almost expect (you don't really need to dimension the spacing of the lines in a typical diagonal pattern used for masonry do you?). Of course if model patterns are treated as raster too then I've got a bit more to be worried about (I do want to be able to dimension the grids of an acoustical tile ceiling).

The ONLY complaint I have with DWF (or at least the only one keeping me up at night) is that you have to have admin privileges to install the viewer. A lot of our clients are governmental in nature and I've found it very difficult to get past their red tape so the applications can be installed.