Hi All,
I searched the forums looking for my particular question (or answer), but couldn't find anything. So, here it goes.
Which Bentley application will allow me to plot/publish a group levels as a PDF. I maintain our Company's service area maps that contain a lot of information and I would like to have one file that would allow users to turn on/off features of the maps to customize the maps to suit their particular purpose (in Acrobat). This would eliminate the need for me to publish multiple maps.
Is there such an animal?
Charles
Charles,
Thomas already mentioned 3D funtionality. As you want to output maps 2D functionality may be helpful.
1. Do not use the Adobe Acrobat Printer driver, which can not produce PDF with levels.
2. Creating PDF with levels is a standard functionality since V8 (20004 Ed.?). Bentley licensed Adobe Acrobat technology and built it into V8. Therefore use the Bentley native pdf.plt or pdf.pltcfg to produce PDF with levels. You may have to edit these files to include level information.
All levels used for the printed output will be part of the PDF.
Additionally you can make use of referencing to control the level structure in the PDF. All levels of the reference will be presented as a subhierarchy of the reference. So you can switch of and on a complete reference in the PDF.
HTH
Gunnar
Thanks Gunnar for the reply. It sort of helped. At least you confirmed what I suspected. Now what I need is some instructions to do this. The ustation help file, to be honest, is useless, so does anyone know, step-by-step, how I can do this?
I found a post in the forums by a gentleman who was having problems with certain levels not plotting with his pdf. He had uploaded a test file (which I looked at) and his file does exactly what I want. I can hack, but it's always faster to ask for help.
WRT Gunnar's #2... there is some useful information in Help > Contents that might be worth checking into, if you have not already (see the attached screen shot for where that is... that was located by clicking on the Search tab and entering "print PDF level" without the " double quotes). Also, you can "expand" all sub-topics at once by clicking on the magnifying glass glyph next to the Up and Down arrows in the upper right of the Help window.
Thanks Phil. I did find that, which led me to figure it out. I wasn't able to successfully print a PDF with layers until I turned off the 'Rasterized' setting in the print dialog box. I now have the same problem the another gentleman had. The layers don't turn off the correct corresponding features. I'll figure that out too, I'm certain. I'm just glad that I was able to get it to work.
Ok. I figured out where the problem lies, at least for me anyway and was able to find a work around. The problem is with the level manager. When I created a pdf file, the first level after 'default' was always the layer to be missing in the pdf but scattered among the other layers. This is consistent across several files, similar in nature. I created a new level, 0000, and put an element somewhere outside the fence, placed my fence, highlighted the levels I wanted to be printed and voila! the 'layers' in the pdf now work as they are supposed to.
There are 2 elements in the 'default' level in the design file but are not visible elements. I believe they are shared cell definitions that cannot be deleted or purged. (I've tried - delete scdefs all). i've also done the 'level usage' and it only tells me it's used in 'models', no cell defs, no dim styles, no multiline styles, no reference attachments. Perhaps transient elements or something.
Anyway, I thought I would pass this along when this happens to someone else.
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