Faint printing of a PDF that came from Pro/E

[gchampoux]

We recently started saving our final deliveralble drawings as PDF's. (archived forever)
They look great on the screen, but are very light/faint when printed from Acrobat Reader to a sheet size that is smaller than the drawing's sheet size.
For example, people commonly print an E-size drawing onto A-size paper (laser printer).
As expected, not only in the drawing small, but the line weights are scaled thinner as well.
We understand that this makes sense, but it makes the drawing text especially difficult to read.

In the past, (before PDF) we did not have this issue.
Our final deliverable was an HPGL plot file.
When these HPGL's were printed from a viewer (Imagenation) the line weights were not thinned.
These prints were much easier to read, even when printed at a fraction of there normal size.

Any advice?

Gerry Champoux
Williams International
Walled Lake, MI

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[llie]

Gerry,

We also experienced the same issue. You need to set the config options
below;

pdf_use_pentable yes.

pen_table_file C:\PTC\WF4\Control_files\plotter\adobepdf.pnt

Change the included pen weights in your adobepdf.pnt to something like

[davehaigh]

ASME Y14.2.M Line Conventions and Lettering calls for thick lines to be approximate 0.6mm wide, thin lines approximate 0.3mm wide. This is typically thicker than a lot of CAD people are used to. But that's the standard.

We use this pen table for metric and inch:
!drawings.pnt
! Object lines plot as .6 mm width lines.
! All others plot with .3 mm lines.
! These values match ASME Y14.2M 92
! Prints all black lines
pen 1 thickness 0.06 cm; color 0.0 0.0 0.0; SYSTEM_GEOMETRY_COLOR
pen 2 thickness 0.03 cm; color 0.0 0.0 0.0; SYSTEM_LETTER_COLOR
pen 3 thickness 0.03 cm; color 0.0 0.0 0.0; SYSTEM_HIDDEN_COLOR
pen 4 thickness 0.03 cm; color 0.0 0.0 0.0; SYSTEM_HIGHLIGHT_COLOR
pen 5 thickness 0.06 cm; color 0.0 0.0 0.0; SYSTEM_SHEETMETAL_COLOR
pen 6 thickness 0.03 cm; color 0.0 0.0 0.0; SYSTEM_SECTION_COLOR
pen 7 thickness 0.03 cm; color 0.0 0.0 0.0; SYSTEM_DIMMED_MENU_COLOR
pen 8 thickness 0.03 cm; color 0.0 0.0 0.0; SYSTEM_EDGE_HIGH_COLOR


David Haigh