Further information for those following this thread...

Gareth's real objective is to communicate with a third party print shop, so the objective is to give them a file that is a faithful reproduction of the SD7 original and allow them to print on any printer, even if you don't have direct access to that printer.

Use of PDF or DWG for this purpose is unnecessary and has drawbacks since it introduces an intermediary application that processes the original SD7 data and can change it (e.g. change resolutions and/or add noise, as here).

A better solution is to use Microsoft XPS Documents. This is a standard and proven technology that has the advantage of being transparent, free and ubiquitous (even if not that well known!).

See http://windows.microsoft.com/en-au/windows7/xps-documents-frequently-asked-questions

Using the Microsoft XPS Document Writer, which can be selected as your printer in SD7, you can Print to a File and then anyone using Windows or the Mac OS (with a XPS Viewer installed) can view that file and print a faithful reproduction of your SD7 document on any printer.

Kind regards,
Rob Robinson
Stardraw.com

Hi Gareth,

If you're encountering problems with quailty in PDFs, particularly with images (PNG, JPG etc) then you should look at the settings of the PDF writer. For example, with CutePDF selected, when you print to PDF click on Properties, then Advanced. In the Graphic - Print Quality option you have a choice of values from 72dpi to 4000dpi. I think the default is a low value, 72dpi or 144dpi which I find too low resolution. I would usually increase this to 600dpi which looks fine to me, but you can go higher if you want.

I have emailed you a sample PDF using this setting.

p.s. there was no attachment to your post.

Kind regards,
Rob Robinson
Stardraw.com

Rob has been fantastic with this so far, but I am no nearer to a solution, so I am wondering if anyone else that uses SD7 has ever had a same problem.

When printing / exporting to PDF - if there are PNG files, or JPG files in the file, they there are faint traces of "Bounding" boxes on the outside.

When exporting to DWG and importing to Autocad 2007 / 2010 - they totally have their bounding / outside of file boxes there. JPEG are slightly better than PNG's but generally worse quality overall. I have tried PDF24, Bullzip PDF, and Cute PDF, and none of them give a satisfactory output. The inbuilt PDF exporter one does not handle Pictures well at all.



Does anyone have any bright ideas at all?

If you look there are lines on the edges of the computers, projectors, even some cable lines have been extended.

If anyone has any bright ideas please do let me know.