Create PDF with High Quality resolution without rasterizing text/dimensions/lineart

Jun 17, 2009 4 Replies

When I create PDF's from my SW drawings often they will be included in marketing materials where the quality and resolution are important. These often contain both black and white and color shaded views.



I can create high resolution PDF's using "High Quality" setting in Page Setup. However doing so converts all lines/text/dimensions to raster(pixelated) format.



If I leave "High Quality" unchecked the dimensions/ lines and text are preserved in their vector format. Which is nice because the text is searchable, it has infinite resolution, and it can be edited in Acrobat Pro. However the resolution of the shaded views becomes poor.



If I use "Save As..." and save as a PDF using the "High Quality" in the PDF Export settings the quality is slightly better and the vector objects are preserved but the resolution is still to low for my needs.



I've tried messing with all the print settings in the PDF printer and all tried saving to PDF, but at the end I seem to be stuck with the two options, low resolution or fully rasterized.


You're probably trying to do too much at once. Doubtful that marketing wants entire engineering drawing w/ dims, borders, and all.

Instead, just create blank scratch drawings and export a single view at a time to PDF.

When you save drawing as tif you can have huge resolution. Can you use tif's?

PDF is the wrong format to be providing to Marketing. You should be providing .dwg. This is much easier for them to handle as it can be imported painlessly into Illustrator or similar applications. Then the issue of what font to use is up to them, as it should be for marketing material.

Matt Lorono

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Matt makes a good point. Don't get sucked into doing too much of marketing's work for them.

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