Acrobat 8 AutoCAD conversion and preflight and repair
During my Adobe-supervised Acrobat 8 demo at the Phoenix Acrobat User Group meeting, PDF guru Steve Matson of Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station smiled when Acrobat 8 converted a native AutoCAD file to PDF. His smile got even bigger when he found out Acrobat 8 can convert *.dwg files to PDF without AutoCAD. Even the layers come in.
The *.dwg I used in the demo was filled with very fine red and yellow lines. When I mentioned that Acrobat 8 preflight tools now repair files as well as generate reports, he asked me to convert the *.dwg to PDF and to then convert the PDF to grayscale. I had no idea if this would work, but I gave it a shot. The “convert to grayscale” preflight profile worked like a champ. The drawing converted wonderfully, and even preserved the layers. The drawing looked a lot better in grayscale, too.
I hadn’t thought of using preflight tools on what Adobe calls AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) PDF files, but I think there is a lot of potential in the concept.
—Carl
