My computer is 4 years old, not new but not ancient. It is very slow to regenerate as I pan around. It has translucent solid colored hatches on top of the aerial photo. It has an aerial photo background as raster, elevation contours and proposed improvements as vectors.
Autocad printing as raster pdf#
Right now I'm looking at a 22x34 PDF from a client made with Civil 3D 2018. Raster is just simpler and more reliable.Īnother reason for Raster PDFs: Vector PDFs can be slow to use on-screen. Sometimes complex mixed vector PDFs won't print at all. Not all printers/plotters will render a complex PDF with large amounts of mixed vector and raster content the same, especially when you add things like shading/opacity of rasters, and scaling into the mix. Another major reason is plotting fidelity. "Locking down" a PDF is not the only reason to print to raster. It seems to me the benefits of vector PDFs far outweigh the perceived protection/reduction of liability of raster PDFs. Vector PDFs are typically smaller than a raster equivalent, and have the additional benefit of producing a higher quality plot. I understand the modern-day apprehensions of vector PDFs, but I firmly believe they are the best archival format we have available today. Before xerographic copiers, blueprints were the only way to reproduce large format drawings. Being a light-sensitive process, blueprints required a transparent vellum or Mylar original to create. Since xerographic copiers could copy anything, many feared the repercussions of theft as they displaced blueprint machines that had some level of copy protection built in. To me the recent discussion about rasterizing PDFs as a way of locking them down is no different than the discussion about large format xerographic copiers when they were first released. Have you encountered any issues with your drawings being stolen in that time? That functionality has existed for no less than 5-8 years. While the convert PDF to DWG functionality was just introduced in AutoCAD 2017, it's always been possible to convert vector PDFs to an AutoCAD readable format. Inkscape, the open source vector graphics application, can export to DXF, whereas Adobe Illustrator can export straight to a DWG. In the "mapping" versions of AutoCAD and Raster Design, you can also make transparent a specific color (hue) of a color bitmap image.I'm not trying to be "that guy", but I might I ask with the most objective intentions why the need to lock down your PDFs? During similar discussions with clients, I've found the question typically stems from a perceived liability about people nefariously reproducing their drawings. The "Invert clip" option will clip the inside of the image, not the outer surrounds of the border - see the sample. The third way is based on the clipping boundary inside the raster image ( IMAGECLIP).The sample image uses the transparency level of 20%. Again, either through the ribbon or over the Ctrl+1. This property can be set for any type of drawing object, including raster images - you can use it to smoothly control the transparency level. The second method is the object property Transparency (new in version 2011).The same property is available also for monochrome (black-and-white) raster bitmaps - e.g. If you enable this entity property, the respective area of the raster image will become fully transparent. This transparency is then used by the option "Background transparency", available in the AutoCAD context ribbon and in the Properties palette (Ctrl+1) and via the command TRANSPARENCY. The first way is using the image property "transparency" available in the raster formats GIF and PNG.
Autocad printing as raster full#
In AutoCAD 2011, you can use three different methods for setting full or partial transparency of certain areas in a raster image (also color image) inserted in a DWG drawing. Three methods for transparent images in AutoCAD.