AggravatingCAD - Plotting to PDF
Autocad is a great program. It's revolutionized the engineering process all over the world. With that said it can be very frustrating at time when it doesn't work properly and does things that make you want to throw your computer out of a window. Earlier I mentioned Wiring Diagrams and how I would put together a group of these diagrams in a layout as part of a project plan set. Now that I was done with the design I needed to plot to PDF to send the whole drawing set to a client or engineer. Autocad has struggled over the years to do this function. If the PDF is going to be over a certain amount of pages it has to be broken up or Autocad will crash (I learned this the hard way.) It didn't seem to matter how fast or good the computer was Autocad just didn't like plotting to PDF. On top of all that it seemed when ever I plotted the Wiring diagram sheet to PDF it would open in a PDF viewer with font errors.
After hours of trying to fix this problem that only seemed to affect my wiring diagrams I decided to change the standard font in the Autocad template I used. Instead of using the Arial font I changed over to Times New Roman. Still didn't help, I kept getting the same error. That's when I decided to search for a new PDF printer instead of the default one for Autocad. After searching I found a PDF printer called Bullzip PDF Printer. It has it's glitches as well but once you get familiar on how to set it up it printed very fast and fixed the issue I was having with the default printer. The one downside is now I have to print the Wiring Diagrams to PDF separately from the rest of the drawings and insert it into the plan set later which does create an extra step. So until improvements are made I'll just have to deal with it.