PDF Converter within Revit 2009

[Denis01]

Is there a PDF converter withing Revit Architecture Suite 2009? I expected there to be one listed among my available printers when I installed Revit on my computer. I've since downloaded PDF 995 and it's fine, although I had to monkey with the actual boarder dimensions of my sheet family so to get them to fit withing the printer's automatic boarders at Staples (where I get my printing done). PDF 995 works fine, but I am surprised not to fine one as part of the Revit application (or is it there and I need to do something in order to download the drivers on my PC?). Any feedback on this is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Denis Dunderdale, AIA
Cotter, AR

[Scott Womack]

Back a few releases Revit did ship with a default PDF printer. It was dropped several releases ago. (Maybe do to Autodesk cutting costs by not paying to liscensing it per Revit seat?) The official line is to use DWF instead of PDF. The DWF's do have several advantages over PDF, except that everyone recieving it needs to download a a free plugin, or the free viewer.

[ntnik]

i have adobe.....i need to look into dwf (an engineer i work with seems to like it alot).....there are pdf sites to download for free...i have downloaded "cute pdf" before and it seemed to work ok

[gautamrs]

I agree. DWFs are way much more better, lighter and smarter. But if your consultants are sticklers for PDFs, I suggest using BlueBeam... I've found this program to be very user-friendly and immensely useful. It is relatively inexpensive to legacy PDF creaters and boasts of a load of goodies to mark up, log and staple PDFs.

And of course, Design Review is FREE! So if you dont mind spending some time evangelizing your consultants on the benefit of DWFs, I'd suggest taking Scott's advice!

[Denis01]

I knew that you guys would have the answer to this. You're awesome.

I've tried Cute PDF and find that PDF 995 has more built-in sizes and formats for drawing sizes. I've not looked at Blue Beam, but I'll check it out.

I use design review frequently and have clients download it for reviewing schemes, etc. It's great and they love it. So do I.

The PDF thing is only an issue with Staples. I am a one-person office, working from home and don't have a plotter at the house. Staple's advice was to send them a PDF and they would print it on their large format copier (up to 24" wide). There are couple of engineers (AutoCad) in the area and that's what they do. That all works fine, now that I've gotten straightened out with the margin/shrink game. What I did there was reduced the dimensions of the outside edges of the 22"x 34" sheet family by a fraction of an inch on each axis. Now the prints are spot-on as far as scale goes. Previously they were shrunk by a few %.

I'll call Staples and see if they would be willing to download the DWF reader and give that a try. This is a very small town (10K people in North-Central Arkansas) and they are the only game in town, so I'm pretty much limited to what they are willing to do, until I'm forced into an in-house plotter (which I'm avoiding like the plague).

Thanks again,
Denis

[clog boy]

THE best PDF creator I have found to date (and will continue to use) is CutePDF. And it's free. Just install, and it'll show as a printer. The only interface you'll have to deal with from there on it the save as... window.

[SCShell]

Hey there,
I personally like PDFCreator. I have never had a problem with it and the file sizes seem to be lower than most free programs.
Just my....not even 2 cents....FREE!
Steve

[clog boy]

Hey there,
I personally like PDFCreator. I have never had a problem with it and the file sizes seem to be lower than most free programs.
Just my....not even 2 cents....FREE!
Steve

All I can say is... nice guitar!! And I'll have a look into PDFcreator.

[brethomp]

We use PDFCreator. It works great, no issues.

[SCShell]

All I can say is... nice guitar!! And I'll have a look into PDFcreator.

Hey there,
Thanks! It's my newest baby.
A real one of a kind!
Steve

[Scott D Davis]

.... except that everyone recieving it needs to download a a free plugin, or the free viewer.

Not necessarily....Windows Vista opens DWF files natively without installing any plugins.

[Alex Page]

Bear in mind that dwf seems to work alot better with vector data than PDF - I assume thats why the file sizes are so small, BUT as soon as you do shadows (or shaded views) the data is raster and dwf sizes seem a lot larger than PDF's