Expert: Kevin Stohlmeyer - 6/30/2008

Question
QUESTION: Hi-

I am brand new to Illustrator and am having two issues that are driving me crazy.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.  I have bought the Dummies book but have not been able to find the answer.

First Question: I am trying to print to the Cute PDF Writer.  The document is 30 inches x 42".  The Artboard sets up fine at 30 x 42" and is fully visible.  The problem is that the page tiling box only appears partially (it is not set at 0,0 and I don't know if it is possible to move it) and every time I print the PDF it gets cut off.  I have tried changing the orientation of the drawing and also have checked that the print setup and the document setup are both at 30 x 42.  Is there a way to move the page tiling box so it is completely visible so my drawing will print correctly to a PDF?

Secondly, I am coloring a drawing that was created in Autocad.  I save the drawing as a PDF and then place it in Illustrator.  When I turn the Illustrator file into a PDF it loses the line weights in the drawing and they look either fat or all the same.

Thank you so much for any help related to both or either of these problems.

Holly

 

Thank you so much for your help!  

Holly

ANSWER: Hi Holly,


First, let me save you a lot of hassle. The Dummies series of books are not the greatest for application support. I would look at Classroom in a Book by Adobe. Much more concise.

Now, when saving to a pdf, do not use the cute PDF writer. Use Illustrator's native Acrobat engine. This will save the entire page without tiling. Otherwise if you have to use cute for some reason, check your page setup and make sure you have made it the same size as your document.

Second, save your Autocad drawing as a DXF or DWG and import this into Illustrator. Also, if you have a newer version of CAD than Illustrator, you may be out of luck completely. The CAD importing options of IL 10 were designed around the then current version of CAD

The solution to both your problems would be to get a copy of Acrobat Pro and use that for both situations. The issue with creating PDFs without Acrobat is some loss may occur when working with them in other applications.


Thanks

Kevin

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Thanks a lot Kevin!  My CAD is 2006 and I have Illustrator 10.  Could I remedy this problem by saving the CAD down to 2000 and then importing it?

Thanks a lot!

Holly

ANSWER: Ding ding ding! Yes you can downsave to 2000, however you may lose some advanced features (since 2000 had less than 2006). So just watch for that and you should be golden.

Thanks!

Kevin

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Hi Kevin-

I tried importing the CAD file (saved down to 2000) into Illustrator.  The problem is that the title block disappears (basically everything in Paper Space) and everything comes into illustrator with the colors of the layers from CAD.  How can I have it come in in black and white while maintaining the lineweights and preserving everything on paper space as well?

Thanks a lot!

Holly

Answer
Hi Holly,

You are almost there, I promise! The hard part was getting this into IL.

When you import these into IL, there is a box at the bottom of the import window to import with options. This may allow you to change this, otherwise...

You can do a select all and then go to Filters>Colors>Convert to Grayscale or Adjust colors. You can adjust your colors to make them black with white fill, while preserving the line weights.

Either way, the idea is to adjust these to a black stroke, so you could also just choose black as the stroke color via the swatches palette!

Thanks

Kevin