Is landscape available for 'Save as PDF'?

[Roller1]

Was just wondering if anyone knows if it is possible to do a 'Save as PDF' in landscape orientation? Always defaults to portrait for me.

Roller1

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

Apparently not inside SW, but once the PDF is created, you can rotate the page(s) using Acrobat. You may have to cheat while inside SW by rotating whatever you want to view thru 90°, so that when you create the PDF it appears as Landscape.


CorBlimeyLimey, Barrie, Ontario.
Sign on a Barrie restaurant reads, "We serve Molsons, but we only smoke Ribs"
faq559-863

 

[automationbabe]

What are you using for PDF creation? Acrobat or Bluebeam Pushbutton?

Pushbutton defaults to portrait for me regardless of what any of my system settings are.

Acrobat, there's a PDF settings tab that you can customize to your needs.

 

[Roller1]

I am using the 'save as' function in Solidworks to create the PDF's. This is an integral part of Solidworks and has nothing to do any other PDF creation software such as Acrobat or Bluebeam (although I do believe Solidworks uses the Bluebeam engine to create PDF's).

 

[mncad]

If you are looking to create PDF files you may want to look at

http://www.pdf995.com.

It is a free download and works very well to create PDF files from any software, not just Solidworks.
You just have to pick the print command then choose the PDF995 as the printer you will use. You can set anything you want, portrait, landscape, size. The only downfall to the free download is it throws up an advertisement in your browser, but that is easily eliminated by sending PDF995 the $9.95 for the software. I've been using it for several months and it seems to work great.

mncad

 

[Areva]

Roller1

Are you talking about 2D drawings or part/assembly drawings or both?

When you save as PDF in SW2004 it automatically defaults to the orientation your 2D drawing was created in, hence the need to have the portrait or landscape option is not offered.
I have just experimented and my A4 pdf was portrait whilst my A3 to A1 pdf's were all landscape as expected.

If you save a part file(.sldprt) or assembly file(.sldasm) as a pdf you get a pick list option offering a paper size and the dimensions given suggest they are in either landscape or portrait format. Every time I use this option, for good quality screen prints, it always gives me portrait pdf's although I've selected the landscape dimension size. Must be a bug!

As CorBlimeyLimey said you could rotate the pdf in Acrobat and cheat by rotating the SW view before saving as pdf to get the desired result.

HTH Eddy

 

[JNR]

Don't know about BlueBeam, but Adobe acts like (and essentially is) a windows print driver, so you can set up anything you want. BTW: We just upgraded to the latest revs of Oracle/SmarTeam last weekend and loaded SW2004 - see my recent post for the method we used. We used a standard method for every one of our 29 systems. Yesterday we loaded SP21. Today I added Photoworks and FeatureWorks to my station which is the onlt one with them. (Individual licences too - before Office was even a twinkle in SW eye.) The Save As PDF feature works perfectly on our systems - just tested it. However, since a few of us have full-up Adobe Acrobat, we will probably still use it - it is MUCH faster.

John Richards Sr. Mech. Engr.
Rockwell Collins Flight Dynamics

A hobbit's lifestyle sounds rather pleasant...... it's the hairy feet that turn me off.

 

[Roller1]

What I am trying to do basically is save a screen dump of a part or assembly to a pdf file (in landscape orienation). It works fine with drawings as you say.

Can you please elaborate on the 'pick list option' you mentioned above Areva? I dont get any options at all when I save a part or assembly.

Roller1

 

[JNR]

Whoa there Nelly! PDF's are not screen dumps. A small but important point. They are recalculated to specific resolutions by printer driver type routines. BTW: That explains why JPEG export resolution sucks and TIFF can be great if you use the "print" option. JPEG's are only screen dumps and are never any better than your screen resolution. Example using 1024x768 you can't get better than a 10.24x7.68 inch picture at 100dpi from a JPEG - which is pretty crappy for most graphics purposes. Whereas you can go to what? 1200 dpi with TIFF - if you have enough disk space and time

John Richards Sr. Mech. Engr.
Rockwell Collins Flight Dynamics

A hobbit's lifestyle sounds rather pleasant...... it's the hairy feet that turn me off.

 

[Roller1]

Thanks John, but I think you have missed my point here. I just want to save what I can see on the screen in pdf format and landscape orientation.

 

[Areva]

Roller1

Hmmm strange……..When you open a part or assembly 3D model file and do a save as pdf, do you get a dialogue box “Paper Size Selection” with the description “The selected paper size is unsupported. Please select a valid paper size from the list below”,
This dialogue box appears on my system! I’m running SW2004 sp1. Can any other SW2004 users confirm this or am I unique?

Eddy

 

[JNR]

Sorry, if I came off a bit snooty. I was not trying to be obnoxious. I was just addressing a finer point for those who might read this thread, get confused and be disappointed in results if they went off and used a real "screen dump". Sometimes people latch on to a "keyword" or phrase and it misleads them depending on how it is used. Having done a lot of training, tech. support and demo-jock work in the past, I have learned the hard way to try to be carefully about that.

I think I understand what you want, Roller1. You just want a quick picture of the graphics area of the screen in a PDF? I assume resolution was never really an issue one way or the other for you.

BTW: One more point for those that do want to use screen dump JPEGs (or TIFFs, etc.) for quick pictures - they do have their uses. The appearance of the JPEG when viewed in another application is virtually never as good as the screen was in SW, even though it is the same resolution as your screen. Strange but true. Things are a lot more jaggey looky. Also small stuff like fine text is much more granulated and usually unreadable. Line weights are variable depending on the number of pixels they needed at the screen scale when it weas created (pixels are in integer numbers!!!). This appears to be common to other applications as well as SW. I guess some of it has a lot to do with the fact that JPEG (well, any screen dump) saves don't address anti-aliasing and so on.

John Richards Sr. Mech. Engr.
Rockwell Collins Flight Dynamics

A hobbit's lifestyle sounds rather pleasant...... it's the hairy feet that turn me off.

 

[Roller1]

Sorry John, my fault. You did not come off snotty at all. The info you provided was informative and pertinent. I just did not express myself well.

I am very interested in what Eddy says though, as I get no options at all when saving as a pdf file. I am running SW2004 SP2.1 + Solidworks Office on Windows 2000.

 

[Areva]

Roller 1

I was hoping a response from other SW2004 users on the availability of this option would be forthcoming.

We have 2 seats here and this option in available on both PC’s. We are using SW2004 SP1 with NT4 SP6a. Perhaps the explanation is the option is only available on NT4 & not Windows 2000. Can anybody else confirm this?

Eddy

 

[jbknudsen]

Hmmmm,
I save as pdf all the time and I have not had any problems with saving to landscape or portriate. Most of our drawings are sent to our vendors in the pdf format. We are running sw2004 sp0. I believe the pdf settings are set to the solidworks print settings.

I will do a bit more diggin to see if I can find out any thing else on the issue.


Jay

 

[jbknudsen]

ok, give this a try. Select "file", "Print" and under the document printer options, select "bluebeam pdf printer. change the options there and the document will print in accordance to your settings.

Jay

 

[slorandy]

I'm having the same problem with not being able to get the Save As>PDF to come out in Landscape. Did anyone ever solve this?

 

[Theophilus]

Not for parts or assemblies. I even went to File -> Page Setup to change the orientation, but it didn't do anything. I'd recommend using PDF 995, which is driven by your print drivers--and therefore should obey your page orientation settings.

Meanwhile, drawings work fine for the Save As PDF function.




Jeff Mowry
Industrial Designhaus, LLC

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

 

[slorandy]

I am working with drawings but can't get landscape orientation, the pdf is portrait (although it looks good otherwise).

 

[SterilMed]

...from the Bluebeam web site:

"SAVE TIME - Bluebeam Lite uses predefined page settings to simplify PDF creation--No need to adjust settings to create an accurate PDF file from CAD applications."

8.5 x 11 portrait - perfect for ALL of your engineering needs!

-Z