PDF Server YAFPC-Appliance Forum

Wolfgang;

I updated to 4.00 and used the manual to install the printer driver on a server to allow for large paper sizes to be plotted from AutoCAD.

The plot previewed in the software OK, but the PDF produced was only a small 8.5 x 11 corner of the plot.

Any idea what may be going wrong?

(Thanks for a great product)

Hi Michael,

there are two ways to success:

1. When plotting from AutoCad first choose the PDF printer, then open the "properties" of this printer, goto "Device and Document Properties" tab, click "User specific Settings" button, click the "Enhanced" button, choose from "Paper Size" the size fitting your plot output. This only works if the plot fits the chosen paper size.

The better way is:
2. First choose the paper size of your PDF printer to the (virtual) paper size and orientation you want to have for the PDF file in "User specific Settings | Enhanced". This size only defines what size is displayed when opening the document by Acrobat Reader without scaling. Then set the "Print Quality" to a large value 3600dpi or 4000dpi (4000 doesn't work in some rare cases because of memory limitations). Then set in the AutoCad plot dialog the "Scaling" to "Fit Printer Settings" and print. The result is a (virtually) small plot that can be zoomed to any detail you want.

Please note: I have only an older AutoCad version with german language dialogs. The dialogs mentioned above might differ in the current version or other languages.

Hope that helps

W.U.

Hi Wolfgang,

Neither of these methods work for what we want to acheive. Method two is unacceptable because the end result may not be to scale. Running on the server allows me to print the larger sizes but it cannot email the file to the user or file it in their folder.

AutoCAD has moved on a bit since the version you are using and print settings are stored within each file. AutoCAD can store setups that create a 'Wrapper' around the printer driver and send it the stored settings at print time.

On our network we can centralise all of these printer settings so that we don't get any problems with different versions of printer drivers and configurations. This has always been our problem with .pdf printer drivers as they need to be installed on the local machines and unless the version used is exactly the same on each machine the settings stored in the drawing file can get mangled.

The ideal solution for us would be to have A1 and A0 sizes available directly of the YAFPC-Aplliance. No more than 400dpi needs to be used for monochrome .pdfs and 150dpi for colour images.

Many thanks for your excellent product, it is very useful to us for things other than AutoCAD.

Regards

David

Hi David,

Some things I do not understand:
If you setup a local PDF printer on a Windows machine using the "ghostpdf.inf" and "ghostpdf.ppd" files (like mentioned in the Manual), you have A0 and A1 paper sizes that can be selected in printer settings. If you print some drawing from AutoCad to this printer it is mailed to you and accessible in your home folder.

Now if you share this printer over the network for other users, they should be able to print A0 and A1 too and get their documents by email or access it in their home folders on the appliance.

Is there something that doesn't work in your environment? Let me know.

To be honest: I have no clue why the A0 and A1 sizes are not available in the point&print drivers as they use exactly the same driver files. But who knows what Windows does?

W.U.