We are receiving great feedback on all the AutoCAD enhancements we made in Acrobat 9 Pro and Pro Extended in converting drawings to pdf. One of the areas we focused on was usability, and taking some of the tasks and reducing the cycle time to complete those tasks. Time is money in our business and we want to aid you whenever we can. Several of you are unaware of how to use the AutoCAD functionality so I want to use this blog entry to walk you through some of the new enhancements specific to the PDF Maker button.
By using the PDF Maker button it allows you to preserve both layouts and layers associated with the drawing, and choose which ones you want to convert to pdf. This started in Acrobat 7 and has continued into Acrobat 9.
The process you would take to complete this task is first select the PDF Maker button in the AutoCAD toolbar.
The following screen will come up and you can choose the layouts you want to include in the pdf output.
The next screen asks you whether you want to retain or flatten layers. In this case I will choose to retain the layers.
I can then pick and choose which layers that I want to retain and also create layer sets.
Then you click OK and the pdf file is created with both layouts and layers preserved.
So what is the enhancement? Well you may have noticed that you had to go through three screens each time you wanted to generate a pdf. The new feature for Acrobat 9 is that you can set the defaults for the layouts, layers and model space so that you do not have to go through these three screens to generate a pdf file. To access this feature in AutoCAD go to the Adobe PDF Menu and select Change Conversion settings.
Once you have selected the menu the following dialogue box will come up and at the bottom of the box you can set your default options for layouts, model space and layers.
Then the next time you choose the PDF Maker button you will just simply type in the name you want to save the file as and the conversion process will begin.
Next week I will cover the new Batch Processing Options in how you can now control page size, plot styles, and model space. Stay tuned for that blog entry.
Have fun,
Jonathan
I am having trouble with the PDF maker ignoring layers when it creates the PDF and they do not show up. Is there a reason why this would be happening?
Hello,
When you select the PDF maker icon it should first ask you which layouts you want to include. I take everything but the model space. Then the next screen ask you to retain the layers. If you select the layers then you can create layer sets. If you just drag and drop the .dwg into an open Acrobat window it will automatically turn all layouts and layers on. Also under the Adobe PDF menu in AutoCAD you can set defaults to include all layers or exclude all layers. Have fun, Jonathan