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April 20, 2007

Creating PDF’s from DWG’s without AutoCAD!

How many times have you gotten a DWG file from some where and needed to view, collaborate, mark up, or print it and didn't have AutoCAD or a proprietary viewer du jour to do it with. Well Acrobat 8 Professional and Acrobat 3D version 8 handles that for you by creating a feature rich PDF without having AutoCAD on your system.

With Acrobat 8 Professional you can create 2D PDF’s with out having AutoCAD on your system, and with Acrobat 3D version 8 you can create 3D PDF’s from 3D dwg files again with out having AutoCAD on your systems! No, don’t pinch yourself your not dreaming! This is just one more bonus you get from Acrobat 8 Professional, saving not having to buy a CAD seat for someone that does not need it.

Ok got your interest up? Let’s take a look at how we create 2D and 3D PDF’s from DWG files without having a seat of AutoCAD.

First find your directory that has your DWG files, then simply Right Mouse Click and select Convert to Adobe PDF

In a few moments you will get a PDF that will have all views that are in the DWG file in the PDF.  What I mean by that is by default AutoCAD has Model Space and Paper Space (or Layouts) you can have multiple layouts and by using this method, you will get all layout tabs as well as the model space tab. 

Paper Space (Layout View)

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Model Space view

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Notice here the size differential. The PDF File is now searchable, all links preserved, tagged, and is now screen reader enabled.  100% full fidelity. 

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So what about multiple files at once?  You can SHIFT Select a group of AutoCAD files and Right Mouse Click and then select Combine Supported Files in Acrobat..  This will bring up the Combine Dialogue box and allow you to rearrange the DWG files, and even select which layouts you want to add to the PDF!

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Here I am selecting which layout I want in my PDF, I do not want to add the Model Space info to the PDF

asdf

Once I have selected all my views, I can then decide if I want a single PDF or a PDF Package (the difference of these will be covered in another entry), here I select the Single PDF option.

asdf

When the combine is finished (about 23 seconds in this case for all 9 PDF's) we save the PDF, did you notice that on the bottom of the dialogue that the final PDF is 1.01MB vs the AutoCAD files being 2.90MB!

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A beautiful combined PDF is the result of this workflow, notice I get all my bookmarks, all layers are preserved, view scale is preserved, everything you would expect is there!

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Let's move to the world of 3D.  So now someone gives you a 3D DWG, what do you do?  Well if you have Acrobat 3D Version 8 you simply follow you bouncing mouse and drag and drop the DWG file into Acrobat 3D Version 8 and....

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you get a (in this case) 2 page PDF file with the 2D layout of the model and...

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the fully interactive, measurable, mark upable, fully Adobe Reader enabled 3D PDF!

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Think of the time and cost savings of using Acrobat 8 Professional and Acrobat 3D Version 8 to create these PDF files. The down stream users benefit most, they do not require CAD knowledge or a CAD seat to create rich interactive PDF's that can be measured, sent for review (using Acrobat's Red Line and Review tools, again in an entry soon.) and the best thing is anyone with the Free Adobe Reader can have the same fun with the files.  Did you know that over the last 18 months we have had 525,000 downloads of the Free Adobe Reader?  With Acrobat 8 Professional and above you can turn on functionality for red lining, measuring, digital signatures, collaboration, and a host of other functions.  In the AEC and EPC industry our documents are our cash if the people that need our files can not read them and interact with them we don't get paid, it's real simple.  I like getting paid so, I'm choosing PDF for my projects.

Ok well it's Friday afternoon, my boys have soccer tonight, so I had better be getting out of here.  Remember to keep some life in your life!

Tim Huff
Acrobat for AEC
Acrobat in the AEC and EPC Industry

Posted by at 3:14 PM | | Comments (1)

April 13, 2007

Eating our own dog food! Adobe goes Green!

 

You're probably saying to yourself; "ok Tim, you've gone off the deep end on this one. Eating your own dog food and being green go together in many ways, but for Acrobat in the AEC and EPC community, it's not totally obvious." I love it when I get to mess with you all a little. But this will become so apparent after I explain.

So here at Adobe what I mean by "Eat our own dog food" is we use all of our technology daily. Our LiveCycle Products such as Adobe LiveCycle Designer, Adobe LiveCycle Forms, Adobe LiveCycle Form Manager, Adobe LiveCycle Document Security, Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server, Adobe LiveCycle Workflow drive our daily workflows anything from travel requests to ordering a new computer, no paper is generated in our processes. We create PDF's of all files and protect them with Policy Server. We even scan in our receipts for expenses to PDF to cut the paper trail. We use digital signatures to sign all legal documents, and of course use all of the creative products and dv products to create our customer facing documentation and web site. So really we are our best and worst customers! Best customers because we use every product we create (all 72) and worst because since we wrote the code we can "Call the baby ugly" if we like. Well, we really don't do that, but there have been some really great...let's say....exciting discussions that have gotten to the point that we had to take it to the soccer field, programmer's vs field! But, I digress.

But as Adobe is a leader in technology, we are also leaders in other areas, one that jumps out is that did you know that the Adobe offices in San Jose are Platinum LEED Certified! Yep, Adobe spent close to $1.3 million dollars to upgrade our offices to get our certification. I know, I know, that sounds like a lot, but check this out, in our first year we saved around $1.2 Million in utilities cost, and with government rebates and such saved $1.5 plus Million!!! So, we made green going green!! (I crack myself up!) I bring this up because we are partners with the USGBC (United States Green Building Council) and helped them streamline their LEED submittal process with our LiveCycle Designer and LiveCycle Forms tools. You can see all the info by clicking here and see a video by clicking here.

A really cool piece was done (click here for video) on the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco (which they used Acrobat 7 Professional and Acrobat 7 3D to cut the amount of paper they had to deal with) and they also show Adobe's LEED process. We are proud to be a Platinum LEED certified building. It helps us tell the story better, when you eat your own dog food!

Remember to put some life in your life

Tim Huff
Acrobat for AEC
Acrobat in the AEC and EPC Industry

Posted by at 3:50 PM | | Comments (5)

April 9, 2007

Come see us at FIATECH April 9-11!

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Hey all, are you in the Washington DC area? Come by and see me (Tim Huff) and Jonathan Bowman at the FIATECH Tech Conf.

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What is FIATECH? Well it is "The Power of Collaboration!" or put into words it is... "FIATECH provides the focus needed to leapfrog ahead with practical new technologies to support FIAPP (Fully Integrated and Automated Project Processes). As a non-profit research, development and deployment (RD&D) consortium, FIATECH offers the collaborative vehicle to fully maximize expertise, attract and leverage scarce RD&D dollars, and reduce risks."

Why is Adobe at FIATECH? That's easy, we want to support the workflows that you all are dealing with. Being members of FIATECH, CII, and others will not only help you by getting more industry specific information into PDF files, but help us be part of the standard creation and there fore be at the fore frount of the spec delivery. Yes that is all marketing speak for "I really dig getting PDF in these workflows and love to geek out on new standards." I admit it, I love to be on the cutting edge, I'm a bleeding edge junkie! Stay tuned for reports from me and Jonathan (See his blog here) on FIATECH.

Keep some life in your life
Tim Huff
Acrobat for AEC
Adobe for the AEC and EPC Industry

Posted by at 4:11 PM | | Comments (0)

April 3, 2007

Week 2 Acrobat for AEC Webinar Series

Yep it's that time again, tomorrow is Wed 4/4/2007 and we have another installment of Acrobat for AEC / EPC series. In this session I will talk about how to put together files from multiple different file types; from CAD, Word Processors, Spead sheets, Visio, Scanned A and D sized sheets, and many other files types including 3D. So please come by and enjoy some free Acrobat 8 Professional training. To Registar Click Here. And as alway Keep a little Life in your Life!

Thanks all
Tim Huff
Acrobat for AEC
Acorbat in the AEC and EPC Industry

Posted by at 1:33 PM | | Comments (0)

April 2, 2007

Ok, Custom Dynamic Stamps, I hear ya!

Sorry, but, I get asked this question almost every day! How do I create a custom stamp in Acrobat 8 Professional or Acrobat 3D Version 8?

How do I add my user name and date like in the standard stamps in Acrobat, or better put, How do I create a custom dynamic stamp.

 

Well, that is the million dollar question today. I was recently at one of the largest EPC firms and that question came up in every group I talked to. I feel your pain, and understand, this is a feature that we need to add to Acrobat 8 Professional and Acrobat 3d version 8 (Hopefully we can get it spec’d for Acrobat 9).

 

How to create a custom stamp?

 

Disclaimer

First off let me preface this with if you work for a large company, you need to comply with the internal standards for stamps used today. Stamps have legal implications. So, please check with your standards committee or IT group before going willy nilly into stamp creation.

 

Second note that this is NOT a supported work flow by Adobe and just a cool tip and trick, so please don’t call customer support if you mess up your stamps.

 

Ok, now that I have covered my backside, let’s jump in. I’ll show you how to do this, but let’s walk before we run.

 

Creating your Custom Stamp

First off, take a step back and think about it, when creating your new whoopee wow stamp, don’t go and scan in your stamp and have a 2 Mb file. Because when you start applying this monster you will be adding 2 Mb each time! Use a graphic program such as Photoshop or Illustrator. I personally use Illustrator because it is vector graphics, and it will save and work natively as PDF files, and the Illustrator .ai file will compress very well into a PDF and the PDF will stay a vector file! Also they scale very well when applied as stamps! Here is a view of my stamp in Illustrator, and a file size comparison:

 

 

 

  

As you can see, the PDF file is 1/3 the size of the Illustrator file and still a vector file.

 

Ok so let’s get to the steps for creating a custom stamp. Here, I have turned on my Comment & Markup tool bar by right mouse clicking on the tool bars and clicking on show Comment & Markup toolbar. This in not a necessary step, I just did it here for clarity.

 

Ok here we go:

 

Select the stamp tool button and go down to and select Create Custom Stamp… you will see the Select Image for Custom Stamp dialogue box shown below

 

 

Now select Browse and select your stamp

 

CustomDynamicStamps-011.png

 

 

Once up see your stamp in the preview window hit OK. You will see the diagloge box shown below, if you have never created a custom stamp before create a new Category by typing a new name in the category pull down. Note that it will not say to type here for new category but just trust me on this one! Give you new stamp a name, and if you used PDF then Uncheck the Down sample stamp to reduce file size; if you use a TIFF or BMP file or a native file format then leave this checked.

 

 

Click OK

 

 

Now let’s check your new stamp by inserting it into your file. When you go to the insert stamps location you will see your new category listed and your new fancy stamp listed.

 

 

 

Pretty cool huh! Well we are have way there, LOL! So far it has been pretty straight forward, from here on out this is a procedure that is not supported by Adobe, so please if you don’t get what you wanted do not call customer support, but add it as a comment here on the blog site.

 

Adding the dynamic gizmo to your custom stamps

 

Ok here is the part you must take a bit slowly because it is not 100% straight forward.

 

Go to your LOCAL Settings and go to this directory. In my case it is the following:

C:\Documents and Settings\thuff\Application Data\Adobe\Acrobat\8.0\Stamps

You will replace thuff with your information.

In that directory there will be one or many (based on how many custom stamps you have) very strangely named files, in my case the file name is; NsZpGu5eHSwLlyVa5gRhsC.pdf if you want to change the name do it now! If you do it later this will probably fail!

 

Now sort by date and open the newest file in Acrobat 8 Professional.

 

Ok good do you have it open? It’s ok I can wait………Ok now let’s move to another directory that is equally hard to find, this will be where the stamps that ship with Acrobat 8 Professional are stored.

 

On a standard Acrobat installation the location will be:

 

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 8.0\Acrobat\plug_ins\Annotations\Stamps\ENU

 

Double click on Dynamic.PDF to open in Acrobat 8

 

 

Now, make sure you go down a couple of pages in Dynamic.PDF till you see a stamp that has By:foozle at 8:50pm, Aug 25,2004, the one I choose was the REVIEWED Stamp

 

 

Now if you have never used the forms technology in Acrobat this may get tricky just go slow and follow along. In Acrobat 8 Professional and Acrobat 3D Version 8 you can go to the Tools menu pull down and then select Forms on the fly out select Edit Layout your stamp should look like this below

 

Select the field, when it turns red, Right Mouse Click and select Copy.

 

Then switch to your custom stamp and paste, you can move it to the correct location and then scale it up or down by dragging the corner areas.

 

 

Close and save your new custom stamp, do not use Save As, just hit Save.

 

Now let’s insert our new Dynamic Custom Stamp!

 

And there you go a Dynamic Custom stamp!

 

Whew, that one was a bit tricky and a little more technical, but something I get asked about this at least 3 times a week!

 

Ok all, I hope that helps, if you have any other burning questions please add them to the comments below!

 

Remember to put some life in your life!

 

Tim Huff

Acrobat for AEC

Acrobat for the AEC / EPC

Posted by at 1:06 PM | | Comments (13)