I am looking for better resolution in my pdfs.
Background is we are moving towards 'full plan sheets' (or what you would call it in English).
Can be very large 'sheets' like 2A0, 4A0 etc when you want to plot a full plane in 1:50.
What settings in MicroStation sets the quality/resolution in the printed pdf?
This?
What is the highest number I can set?
600 dots per mm. That is a lot! mm on what ?
I have feeling Plot dialog PAPER(ABDspeak)/Usable area(OBDspeak) play a role here.
Hi Thomas,
Thanks for letting us know about this.
Let us have some discussion regarding your concern and we will update you accordingly.
Regards,Sayan
it depends on a lot of things first
are you using sheet model paper size and scaling the model down to the paper or are you scaling title block paper frames up to the ground in model space?
Do you have rasters attached? ie air photos then you need to change the raster resolution / quality down 100 % ( your says 100, 000 ) remove the extra 0s and comma and say make it 75 would be fine for most jobs.
Now the DPI will make a big difference to pdf resolution quality especially if users use the zoom function in a pdf reader...
So if your 600 dpi isnt cutting it try 900, then later try 1200 but this will significantly increase the pdf size.
Under the other settings there are other options for advanced which make the text searchable and the pdf georeferenced these may be turned off or on it too may also affect pdf size, I don't like changing text searchable feature its too useful.
The compression type can also affect raster resolution and pdf size the default is zip as I used a lot of airphoto back ground I changed it from zip to jpg.
Lastly for viewing with Adobe acrobat when zoomed in too much the magnification makes things like text into fat blobs and lines too thick and you cant really read the text, the user needs to be trained to use control 5 ( if my memory is correct) and this will toggle on / off line weights making super zoomed view text very easy to read....
I used to do a lot of roll plots typically 5 meters long and A0 height as the width and if they needed to read tiny text, so I calculated the min size text in cad to work it for min size on the prints or pdfs annotation scale helped this a lot, on paper we found min text for clarity was 1.8mm high on the actual paper finished plot size..
I don't know about other peoples experience but I found a lot of trial and error was needed to establish best practice for roll plots and configuring the pdf.pltcfgs and I made several deferent ones for specific conditions and sizes..
But I can't stress enough the educating users in adobe acrobat weight on off toggle (control 5 ) when zooming right in ...it doesn't alter the pdf as they are read only .. its a view setting toggle in the viewer.
Most of my plans were for road works so they really were just maps with notes on them so text visibility was very important to us.
Lorys
Started msnt work 1990 - Retired Nov 2022 ( oh boy am I old )
But was long time user V8iss10 (8.11.09.919) dabbler CE update 16 (10.16.00.80)
MicroStation user since 1990 Melbourne Australia.click link to PM me
Scaling the paper to 1:50 or 1:100
no never
the setting is 600 per mm !?!? the files sizes are not a problem
regards /Thomas Voghera
hi Thomas
sorry we use the default as Dots Per Inch here and though yours was too, but not 600 per mm, I think that is too high IMHO,
Though I'm not 100% sure that the driver uses anything but DPI even if you change the units to mm I think its still its still using DPI.
You can make raster 100% and use any number of DPI you want it again depends on printing later from pdf to paper or just viewing and zooming, when you zoom a pdf it actually magnifies so things look thicker and harder to read text.
Here in Oz while we are metric but we talk DPI as it seems to be printer manufacturer standards most of us use 600 DPI for almost everything, but when I was doing large area map coverage for our international airport , we use the maps for internal use online and needed to be very highly detailed and have upto 2400 DPI. you can calculate the best resolutions based on scale and paper size and yes we used very high quality nearmap raster images of 10cm resolution.. so by experiment I found because our maps needed to cover 5km length and width but need to fit on A0 x2 a customised size so the scale was determined by the paper size that best fit and my resolution of 2400 DPI was very high ... .. we found that most users could not open pdfs if I made the resolution much higher and the file sizes were very large and it looked like the pcs and pdf reader just couldnt handle the data size.. But I cant stress enough the Control 5 in adobe reader for users who zoom in 300 plus % to still read details as reader magnifies line weights.
I cant test here anymore but you can do tests where you change the DPI resolution to the best optimum, going too high reaches a point where it makes little difference to the viewing but big difference to time to open and time to generate files becomes almost exponential..
BTW you used 100 comma 000 for the percent value it should be max 100 as its in percent it may make no difference but the coding for printers is old and may not use it properly when creating pdfs which are for Adobe's formatting.
I created a std test file with raster and line work and text and did trial and error to determine the best resolution.
I even ended up with a few print drivers to make it easier for our drg office staff to use
everyday( default) 600dpiPDF.pltcfg
1200dpiPDF.pltcfg
2400dpiPDF.pltcfg
Hi Lorys
Thanks for answer.
Regarding the comma - the screen grap is of default driver.
(and here in Europe we use comma as separator)
A solution was to create a new 'paper' in the driver. But I am still confused of some details in this.