Dashed lines

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morrieg
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Joined: Wed Oct 16, 2019 2:06 pm

Dashed lines

Post by morrieg » Sat May 29, 2021 3:04 pm

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?

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Alfred Scott
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Re: Dashed lines

Post by Alfred Scott » Sat May 29, 2021 3:17 pm

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

morrieg
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Joined: Wed Oct 16, 2019 2:06 pm

Re: Dashed lines

Post by morrieg » Sat May 29, 2021 3:36 pm

OK, that works. I can live with that, but I'm forced to make my dashes a bit bigger than I'd like.

morrieg
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Re: Dashed lines

Post by morrieg » 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.

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Alfred Scott
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Re: Dashed lines

Post by Alfred Scott » Tue Jun 01, 2021 2:19 pm

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

PeterKona
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Joined: Sat May 08, 2021 12:15 am

Re: Dashed lines

Post by PeterKona » Mon Jun 14, 2021 11:54 pm

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.

morrieg
Posts: 48
Joined: Wed Oct 16, 2019 2:06 pm

Re: Dashed lines

Post by morrieg » Tue Jun 15, 2021 12:10 am

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.

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