Pro/E to Illustrator EPS Export

[soxmann]

Greetings:
I need to export Pro/E drawings to a vector based format for use in customer documentation. Adobe Illustrator .eps files with an 8 bit preview would be ideal. I have tried:
Utilities | Environment | Spin Center. Then deselected Spin Center. Applied. Then File | Export | Image. Select eps, resolution 8 bit index, size A. This is what the tech support folks said would work.

It doesn't.

Anyone know what does work? Or any other workarounds?

Thanks,

Karl Schmidtmann

 

[forumlurker]

I rep a design firm that had the same needs for vector based format support, and it seems like we jumped through the same hoops--very frustrating.
(Warning: commercial bias introduced, please delete if not appropriate)
Then along came Adobe Acrobat 4.0. Acrobat creates a printer driver that allows "printing" to an Adobe PDF file from within ProE ( > FILE > PRINT > (Destination) MS PRINTER MANAGER > (Set printer to) Acrobat PDFWriter).
"Adobe PDF is a universal file format that preserves all of the fonts, formatting, colors, and graphics of any source document, regardless of the application and platform used to create it. PDF files are compact and can be shared, viewed, navigated, and printed exactly as intended by anyone with a free Adobe Acrobat® Reader™. You can convert any document to Adobe PDF, even scanned paper, using Adobe Acrobat 4.0 software."...believe the hype.
The money for Acrobat (cheap by software stds) is worth it for ProE and for other apps and departments.

 

We had the same problem at my place of work. We constantly need to exchange files between marketing and engineering. Adobe illustrator won't export to iges or dxf format and Pro-e won't export to ai format. We were able to locate a program that will do that. It's called cadmover-"Warning: commercial bias introduced, please delete if not appropriate"- It has worked for us pretty well. It cost about 400 bucks I think. It's expensive because there's not many other convertion programs in the market that I know of. It supports ai, dxf, iges and many more formats. It's a pain to use at first but it has bailed us out.
Hope this helps and if anyone knows a better and cheaper way to do this I'd like to know.

 

[soxmann]

Thanks to both of you for the input.
Another solution was suggested off-list, and this works fine for us.
Pro/E can export to a PostScript file. Simply change that .ps extention to .ai, and open in Illustrator. Then save as an .eps file with 8 bit IBM preview, and include fonts.
We have only used this method in a couple of experiments, but it has worked like a champ so far. It is fast. And it doesn't require additional software.

Again, thanks for the responses.