tyler614•1mo agoProlific Poster

That time I trusted a PDF export without double checking

I was working on a set of foundation plans for a small addition in Columbus a couple months back. Finished everything in AutoCAD, hit export to PDF, sent it off to the structural engineer for review. He calls me later that day sounding confused because two of the footing dimensions were showing up completely wrong on his end. I pulled the original DWG file back up and the dimensions were perfect, but the PDF had some kind of layer glitch that shifted the text. Spent an hour digging through the export settings and found out one of my annotation layers was set to not plot by default even though it showed up on screen. Now I always do a quick visual scan of every PDF before I send it out, even if I'm in a hurry. Has anyone else had a random export setting screw up their drawings like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

tylerr291mo ago

Actually that layer thing is a pretty common trap but you're mixing up what the actual problem was. The issue isn't the layer being set to not plot by default. Its the opposite. If a layer is set to not plot, the text AND the object itself both disappear from the PDF. What happened to you is you had the text on a layer that WAS set to plot but the annotation scaling or the text style definition got corrupted. I've seen it a dozen times where the dimension text moves or scales wrong in the PDF because the annotative scale wasn't synced up. The fix is to check the ANNOMONITOR and make sure all your annotative objects match the viewport scale. Your export settings probably just showed the underlying geometry fine but spit out the text at a different position.

sethanderson1mo ago

That's a good theory but I've had annotative text vanish even with ANNOMONITOR clean.

ruby_sanchez451mo ago

Alright, hold on @tylerr29 but I gotta push back hard on that one. I've had setups where the layer was set to not plot but the geometry still showed up fine in the PDF, just with the text box totally blank. That's backwards from what you're saying, and it happened on a file where the annotative scales were all synced and clean. Plus, if the text style definition got corrupted, wouldn't every instance of that style break, not just the ones in the PDF? Your theory sounds good on paper, but I've seen the exact same layer trap bite people the other way around way more often. Sometimes it's just the PDF driver itself messing with the font mapping, not the annotation or layer settings at all.