When plotting an AutoCAD drawing that contains imagery (either imported with Plex.Earth or otherwise embedded into your file) to PDF, part of that imagery may not show up in the final output, although it appears correctly in the plot preview.
This is a common issue in AutoCAD drawings with raster images and has been discussed extensively in Autodesk's forum.
Below, we have gathered the solutions that have proved to be the most effective for our users, in order to fix this problem.
1) Change the Quality of your Raster Images
In your plot dialog:
- Select "DWG To PDF" and click on "Properties".
- From the Plotter Configuration Editor, choose "Custom Properties" and click on "Custom Properties" (down below the other custom properties).
- Go to "Raster Image Quality" and set it to a lower number. This may make your images look worse, so stay as high as you can.
- Export your drawing to PDF.
Keep in mind that images bigger than 2500 pixels may not show up in PDF's. Therefore, try to resize your images to 2500 pixels or under in all cases.
2) Make Sure that you Have no Clipping Boundaries
Select your images and then:
- In the properties window, on the bottom, set "Show Clipping" to "No".
- Publish your drawing to PDF.
- Once you've published it, you can revert the "Show Clipping" option to "Yes".
3) Assign the Plot Quality for OLE Objects
Type "OLEQUALITY" in the command line of AutoCAD and set the plot quality for OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) to 0 or 1.
(0 - Monochrome, 1 - Low graphics, 2 - High graphics and 3 - Automatically Select)
4) Change the Settings for Plotting Raster Images
Type "RASTERPERCENT" and "RASTERTHRESHOLD" in the command line of AutoCAD and set them to 90 and 100. The first command sets the maximum percentage of available virtual memory that is allowed for plotting a raster image and the second one specifies a raster image threshold in megabytes when printing.
5) Use Different PDF Codecs
In some cases, the full version of Adobe Acrobat may not print the images, but various freeware version might do. In any case, use Adobe Acrobat version 8 or higher.
Finally, here are some tips that can be used for PDF exports as well as more general cases.
General Printing Tips
- Import your imagery with Plex.Earth as .png. Png works out better for plotting as it is a lossless compression method, unlike jpeg that loses data in the conversion.
- Try exporting your drawing as a PDF instead of printing it as a PDF. Exporting does not create a single PDF file of the entire .dwg and you will have all your sheets as layout tabs on a single file.
- If you are suddenly encountering problems with printing, you might have unwillingly changed your settings. In that case just reset your settings in AutoCAD to their defaults, as described in this tutorial. Be aware that you will lose all setting you have changed this far.
- Every time you print, remember to change the paper size so as to cover your whole drawing. The red square, as shown below, indicates that the drawing will be bigger than the printing paper and this might create problems for your exports.
If you are still experiencing problems, please contact us at support@plexscape.com.