This is a quick test of plotting a test drawing (87 KB) to different formats using AutoCAD 2008.
I pasted some cells from Excel 2007 as OLE objects into a drawing and used different printers and plotted to different formats and here is the result.
| Printer | Screen capture of result | File size | Text quality | File |
| Adobe PDF using Acrobat 8 Professional |  | 57 KB | As text | Download PDF |
| PrimoPDF |  | 25 KB | As text | Download PDF |
| DWG To PDF.pc3 included with AutoCAD 2008 |  | 216 KB | As graphic | Download PDF |
| DWF6 ePlot.pc3 included with AutoCAD 2008 |  | 76 KB | As graphic | Download DWF |
| Microsoft XPS Document Writer included with Windows Vista |  | 112 KB | As text | Download XPS |
As you can see the winner in this specific test was PrimoPDF a great free PDF printer. The size was the smallest and the text is still text in the PDF file and is searchable.
Feel free to print the test drawing yourself using your favorite printer software and format and add a comment on the result.
Restored comment
ReplyDeleteby Anonymous
I was all ready to switch my PDF print driver to PrimoPDF from the open-source PDFCreator, but it doesn't seem that PrimoPDF has any way to create AEC paper sizes. The Windows print driver doesn't seem to have any way to add/configure any paper sizes other than about the standard eight (letter, legal, ledger, tabloid, etc.). PDFCreator at least has ANSI, ARCH, etc. as default paper sizes...
CraigV
Restored comment
ReplyDeleteby JTB World
There is a way to add paper sizes to PrimoPDF. See this link.
http://forums.primopdf.com/showthread.php?t=147