Supported Document Sizes

[ScottG]

PrimoPDF works very well for small Letter, Legal, and Tabliod size documents. We want to print large cad drawing documents to it also. Is there anyway to set the page size to 24"x36" or 30"x42" sizes? We do not want to reduce the size.

Thank-you!

[Douglas Saltsman]

The only way to achieve this would be to change your driver to one which will allow you to specify your desired size as the paper tray option. You can install any PS driver you want (all will have different configuration) and simply assign the primoport as the port used. Then primo will function just as it always has but with the change in the settings that the driver allows.

Does that make sense?

[ScottG]

I will give that a try with a plotter driver. That will be great if it works with large scale sheet sizes.

Are they going to fix the Windows 98se installation. I have tried multiple times using all of the tricks found on this forum but have not been able to get it to work on Win98se.

Thanks for your response.

Scott

[Douglas Saltsman]

The new installer should fix the 98se issues. Download it and try it out.

[ScottG]

Just downloaded PrimoPDF again (3/29/04) and now I get a General Fault Protection Error immediaitly after clicking on Next after the "Welcome the the Installshield wizard for PrimoPDF" window pops up. The previous version at least attempted to install.

I am trying to install it on a clean - freshly loaded Win 98se workstation.

Any ideas?

[Douglas Saltsman]

That shouldn't be happening. We tested it on a lot of 98se machines without any problems. I would recommend that you close all tsrs except systray and explorer and try the install again. Do you have another machine you can try it on?

[ScottG]

Douglas,

I tried installation on another Windows 98 Machine and it worked flawlessly. Can't figure out why it failed on the first machine I tried - especially because that machine was freshly reformated and very "clean".

I did try your suggestion to solve printing large size docments by creating a new printer (HP DesignJet 1050c) and assigning it to the PrimoPDF port. It seems to want to work and launches the PDF file it creates but there is nothing in it and despite selecting 30x42 as the images size it shows up as a blank 8.1/2 x 11 page. Any idea why it won't work? Should I use a different plotter/printer selection?

I tried printing a Word document to it and it worked great.

A few other questions / suggestions.
1. Is there anyway to make it default the either "Screen" or "Print" output?
2. It would also be nice if you could set a default folder and if it automatically created the PDF file as the current file name.

Thanks for all your help. This looks like it may be a very usefull tool.

Scott

[MBIpdf]

I have been able to make the 2x3 and larger pdf's just fine. Select the PrimoPDF printer and change the PostScript Custom Page size to what you require. If using AutoCAD, make the changes in you require and then save the .pc3 file with a name that shows the paper size you created it for.

As for Windows 98....upgrade!

Make sure you have the latest Adobe Reader (yuch) as well.
As for getting a true "scale" pdf plotted, good luck, I can't ever get them to plot properly. There are too many margin differences and issues that end up affecting the out put.

Adobe recently said they had no idea that our engineering type fields were even using pdf for large format stuff.

[ScottG]

MBIpdf - I agree would like to upgrade to Win 2000 and we do have mostly 2000 machines but also several 98se machine which actually work very well. The new PrimoPDF install on Windows 98 seemed to work very well (at least on the one machine I just tested).

As far as getting it to plot on large format (30x42 or 24x36) I guess I have to mess with it some more. We are plotting out of Bentley Microstation J - don't use Autocad at all. I have been able to do this fine using the comercial version of Adobe Acrobat but its too expensive so would like to use PrimoPDF if possible.

It is my understanding the Bentley (Microstation) is embracing PDF in a big way and future releases are going to have it built-in. Autodesk seem to want to standardize on DWF which I think is a mistake.

Thanks for your response - i will try another plotter driver the HP DesignJet 1050c driver I used is not a Postscript driver. Maybe that's the trick.

[MBIpdf]

PDF does fine is some applications but until they make a viewer like the new DWF Composer where the image can be marked up, I'll go the DWF way. File size is 25% that of a pdf as well. Lots of reasons to look at dwf. My 2 cents on that. Good luck with your problem.