Page 1 of 1
Dashed lines
Posted: Sat May 29, 2021 3:04 pm
by morrieg
I need to make PDFs of my drawings containing dashed lines. If I "print" and save as PDF, the dashed lines come out solid. The only way I can get the dashed lines to show up is to export to PNG or some other bitmap format. Is there some other trick I'm missing?
Re: Dashed lines
Posted: Sat May 29, 2021 3:17 pm
by Alfred Scott
Morrie,
The dashes are all there but the gaps in the dashes are so small they disappear.
Try using the Dash Adjuster tool in WildTools to fix this.
Alfred
Re: Dashed lines
Posted: Sat May 29, 2021 3:36 pm
by morrieg
OK, that works. I can live with that, but I'm forced to make my dashes a bit bigger than I'd like.
Re: Dashed lines
Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2021 12:41 pm
by morrieg
Is there any trick to make dashes with smaller gaps to show up in a PDF file? The gaps show up perfectly if I convert to JPEG or PNG.
Re: Dashed lines
Posted: Tue Jun 01, 2021 2:19 pm
by Alfred Scott
Morrie,
As I recall, the gaps have to be more than 1pt because, believe it or not, it’s a limit of QuickDraw.
You can find any number of dashed lines in the StyleTools palette.
Alfred
Re: Dashed lines
Posted: Mon Jun 14, 2021 11:54 pm
by PeterKona
morrieg wrote: ↑Tue Jun 01, 2021 12:41 pm
Is there any trick to make dashes with smaller gaps to show up in a PDF file? The gaps show up perfectly if I convert to JPEG or PNG.
Are you reducing the image in some way such as not printing at 100% or printing a portion of the file, reduce to fit? I haven't had an issue with dashes on most print to pdf, but if I print reduce to print, some dashes might not show.
Re: Dashed lines
Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2021 12:10 am
by morrieg
The problem occurred when my page size was 8.5x11 and my drawing was roughly D-size, and I did a print window/fit to page so the entire drawing was shrunk to a letter-size page. Alfred said the lower limit on dash size was 1 pt but I don't think my dashes or the gaps were that small even when shrunken down, but this gave me a clue what to do. To work around this, I set my page size to be 26x33 and did a print window/fit to page, so the dashes showed up. But the page was too big to print, of course, and Acrobat won't scale down a large sheet to fit in a smaller page. But Preview does. So I opened the resulting PDF file in Preview, and did a print/save to PDF to letter size paper with scale-to-fit set. This shrunk everything down to the size I wanted with the dashes remaining.