API PrintManager etc and printing to PDF995

[r.howarth]

I've been stuck on this one for a couple of days, so any help is appreciated.

I'm developing our own customized version of the print screen, with the aim of making it a similar interface/ease of use to the one we had for cad.

I can plot to our Oce Plotter until the cows come home, no problems there, but the problem is in the more tricky part of it I'm doing.

I'm making a plot to PDF functionality, that links in with PDF995 (free, but we bought a license to get rid of ads) and prints it and then moves it to the correct folder, correctly named ready for our document management system.

That works great except for one thing... the pdf's seems to always print in portrait, with the drawing printing in landscape. The result is I have a portrait PDF with white space at the top, and the drawing down the bottom, with its sides cut off. (ie the drawing things its a landscape print, pdf things its portrait so it just cuts it off)

I've tried everything I can to work it out. I programatically set each of the print settings we need (landscape, zoom 100%, no margins etc) and it didn't make a difference.

Then I went to the normal print mode and set my settings exactly the same and printed to pdf995 and it came out perfect. So I saved those settings as "PDFWORKS" and made my program simply chose the PDFWORKS settings and print using that. The same problem occured!

I thought it must have been a bug in my code so I've been changing everything for the last 2 days. Then I decided to try printing with the ViewPrinter sample that comes with the API, I chose the PDFWorks settings and low and behold, the same error I was getting occurs.

So.. that leads me to believe it is something to do with the API itself, what is different in the API that isn't in normal cntrl+p printing??

Can anyone give me an idea of where to go?

[r.howarth]

it seems the problem does not occur on any machine other than mine, which makes me think its a PDF995 problem (and hence not relevant to this forum) but it is weird the problem only occurs when printing from the API.

[john.murdoch]

Hi Rod!

Suggestion: take a look at Softland's NovaPDF:

http://www.novapdf.com/

I spent a ton of time looking at a bunch of different PDF tools for automating printing of (then AutoSketch, now AutoCAD) shop drawings for spec submittals. A bunch of the low-cost tools are all based on the same "open source" libraries--and thus share the same flaws. My users routinely print to ANSI A through E size sheets in PDF--portrait and landscape.

I note you're in Australia--the Softland developers are in eastern Europe. I've found that they are very responsive and provide terrific support. The one annoying thing about NovaPDF is that it defaults to European paper sizes--I have to do a bit of work to expose North American paper sizes for my users. For you, obv., that won't be a problem.

Highly recommended.

[r.howarth]

thanks john!

We've got an old pdf995 license and aren't allowed newer versions on our license agreement, so if we look at purchasing a new one I'll tell them to give novapdf a go.

Cheers