Driver resolution

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.

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?

Scaling the paper to 1:50 or 1:100

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.

no never

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.

the setting is 600 per mm !?!? the files sizes are not a problem

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.

Thomas Voghera said:

A solution was to create a new 'paper' in the driver. But I am still confused of some details in this.

what things are you confused about?  Like  I said before paper size if your  using  sheets  or  models makes things scale down or up and  DPI  say dots per inch of  paper dictates resolution ... please  expand  on what things need explanation so we can help..

what happens if you don't use a comma and  just key in 100? doesn't the  comma separator mean 100 thousand  percent?

To answer your original post  600 DPI  means  600 dots of ink can fit in one inch of  paper  ( for ease of  understanding lets think only left to right) this is  not screen resolution .. if you open a  pdf and  look at  properties you can also see values for resolution.

This is also effected by  screen quality , screen size , video cards etc... just as printer / plotter quality is aslo effecting the  finished out puts.. I'm not a graphic artist this is their field of expertise as they deal a lot with images and paper etc for magazine mass production and  high quality ...

I have tinkered with mapping in microstation since V5 for dos replace intergraph clix.. and we started using cheap inkjet roll plotters.

I needed to work out what all the settings were for and  there used to be excellent documentation on all this  pre v8i  .. sorry no longer avail to me those pcs are long gone.. but some things I wrote down in scrap books to help me  modify drivers...

Once you understand the basics you can do a lot of trial and error with copies of the modified print drivers even making special ones for specific tasks and  pen tables can enhance these even further. But you  need to document everything as no every drafter that comes along after you will understand  what and  how.

Thomas Voghera said:

A solution was to create a new 'paper' in the driver. But I am still confused of some details in this.

what things are you confused about?  Like  I said before paper size if your  using  sheets  or  models makes things scale down or up and  DPI  say dots per inch of  paper dictates resolution ... please  expand  on what things need explanation so we can help..

what happens if you don't use a comma and  just key in 100? doesn't the  comma separator mean 100 thousand  percent?

To answer your original post  600 DPI  means  600 dots of ink can fit in one inch of  paper  ( for ease of  understanding lets think only left to right) this is  not screen resolution .. if you open a  pdf and  look at  properties you can also see values for resolution.

This is also effected by  screen quality , screen size , video cards etc... just as printer / plotter quality is aslo effecting the  finished out puts.. I'm not a graphic artist this is their field of expertise as they deal a lot with images and paper etc for magazine mass production and  high quality ...

I have tinkered with mapping in microstation since V5 for dos replace intergraph clix.. and we started using cheap inkjet roll plotters.

I needed to work out what all the settings were for and  there used to be excellent documentation on all this  pre v8i  .. sorry no longer avail to me those pcs are long gone.. but some things I wrote down in scrap books to help me  modify drivers...

Once you understand the basics you can do a lot of trial and error with copies of the modified print drivers even making special ones for specific tasks and  pen tables can enhance these even further. But you  need to document everything as no every drafter that comes along after you will understand  what and  how.

Thanks for answer Lorys

I should have said 'we use comma as decimal separator, as you use dot'.

I am still a bit confused of what the settings in the first dialog means. Hopefully Sayan will come back.

Increasing the paper size solved my problem. Seems the resolution works for the sizes I have used, but I guess there is a limit somewhere.

And you maybee right the resolution is per inch even if stated mm.

Thomas Voghera said:

I am still a bit confused of what the settings in the first dialog means

post pics  of  each tab your unsure  of and we'll try to explain as much as we can ok?

I'm retired from work now so have  plenty of time to help where I can and happy to do so, ok?