Adjusting line thickness when printing to a PDF

[mmdiver]

When I print a drawing file to a PDF, the lines are too thick to see the details in certain areas; it just looks like a black box. How do I change the thickness of lines that get printed to a PDF? I am 99% positive this is a setting in Pro/E, not Adobe.

PS. I am working with PRO/E 5.0

 

[dgallup]

Getting Pro/E to correctly create a PDF directly is a bit like teaching a pig to sing. It's a waste of time and annoys the pig. I have been creating PDFs by the same indirect technique for about 20 years (how long have PDF's been around?). Print to a postscript file and convert it to PDF. All the "normal" (for Pro/E) print settings work including pen table files, etc.

For some unknown reason PTC decided to give PDF creation a completely different user interface than any other kind of printing. To make it work properly you will have to go through the save a copy menu (not the little icon thingy) and make all the correct settings including stroke all fonts and all kinds of other unexplained stuff. You need to do this every time, it doesn't remember settings and there are no config variables available to control it. You do need to set the config option pen_table_file and have it point to one just for PDF creation as the units seem to completely different than any other plotter. Once you have it all figured out you need to record a mapkey to make it repeatable.

It will still screw up some drawings so you're better off just printing to postscript files and converting.

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The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.

 

[LawrenceS2]

There is one other option: mapkeys. I have one set up for printing to PDF that we have been using with Wildfire 4.0 for about 2 years now. I even took the time to make an icon for it and dropped it right next to my Save As... button on the toolbar.

The only problem is that if you use the default PTC Font, you have to make sure that you select Stroke All Text, otherwise it will convert all text to Arial and kill any formatting you have done. If you are using a truetype font, I think that the later datecodes of WF4 (post m120) and WF5/Creo Elements/Creo will embed the font in the PDF, rather than converting to Arial.

Below is a section from my Config.Pro with the configs set to make the PDF use the pentable and the location of the pentable (we use a C:\proeusr folder to store all custom user configs for Pro), along with the PDF mapkey (command to active is to type the letters pdf). I also have included below the contents of my pentable.pnt.


In Config.pro
pdf_use_pentable yes
pen_table_file C:\PROEUSR\PENTABLE.PNT
mapkey pdf @MAPKEY_LABELprint to pdf;~ Command `ProCmdModelMkPdf` ;mapkey(continued) ~ Select `intf_pdf` `pdf_color_depth`1 `pdf_mono`;mapkey(continued) ~ Select `intf_pdf` `PDFMainTab`1 `PDFContent`;mapkey(continued) ~ Select `intf_pdf` `pdf_font_stroke`1 `pdf_stroke_all`;mapkey(continued) ~ Activate `intf_pdf` `pdf_hyperlinks`0 ;mapkey(continued) ~ Select `intf_pdf` `PDFMainTab`1 `PDFFormat`;mapkey(continued) ~ Activate `intf_pdf` `pdf_launch_viewer`0 ;mapkey(continued) ~ Activate `intf_pdf` `pdf_btn_ok`;


Contents of pentable.pnt
pen 1 thickness .003 in
pen 2 thickness .003 in
pen 3 thickness .003 in
pen 4 thickness .003 in
pen 5 thickness .003 in
pen 6 thickness .003 in
pen 7 thickness .003 in
pen 8 thickness .003 in

 

[jvian]

I use the PDF pentable.pnt as well and have quite a bit of control over line thicknesses and patterns this way, but it was quite a pain to get set up in the beginning. The best thing I did was to set the default font to something more readable than the default ProE font (which I feel is highly unreadable) within the default format of the drawings. My recommendation is do as much as you can on the format and template level of the default drawing in both the config.pro and detail options. Now when I "publish to PDF" (which is different from printing as PDF) it is a simple one click and the drawings are now very readable. I have noticed several improvements in creating PDF's with WF5.0 and Creo 1.0 when compared to WF3.0 and WF4.0 but this is just my experience. Our manufacturing guys here really liked the switch to the true type Arial from the default ProE font on our large and cluttered drawings. That and the change to the pentable gave us more control over the level of detail as well.

Here is a link to creating pen table files from PTC knowledgebase:

http://www.ptc.com/cs/cs_27/howto/plt522/plt522.htm

Hope that helps and good luck,

- J -