How to export to PDF with smooth fonts and curves

[snoopy]

I have created some silk screen images using true type fonts and lines and curves etc but when I export them to a pdf the curved part of the fonts are a bit jagged and the case maker won't accept them for silk screening. The puzzling part is that anything other than a font that has a curve renders perfectly in the pdf. Does anyone have any solutions for creating artwork for silk screening ? I wanted to avoid doing it in Corel Draw etc since it is a lot easier to lay everything out in the pcb file along with the drawings of the metal work.

regards

[ajb]

Wow, I've never looked that closely at the PDF export, but yeah, the rendering of curves is terrible.  Example attached for the curious--the text is 75mil high on the PCB about 87mil in the PDF.   Are you using an outjob for this?  If so, there's a "TT Fonts" checkbox in PCB Printout Properties under Printout Options, does this make any difference?

Otherwise, perhaps you could try sending the case manufacturer a DXF or DWG?  I think truetype fonts are exported properly in those formats.  Or, worst case, if you've already got access to CorelDraw or somesuch, replace the text there, using the text from Altium's PDF as a guide, and save as a new PDF?

[snoopy]

Wow, I've never looked that closely at the PDF export, but yeah, the rendering of curves is terrible.  Example attached for the curious--the text is 75mil high on the PCB about 87mil in the PDF.   Are you using an outjob for this?  If so, there's a "TT Fonts" checkbox in PCB Printout Properties under Printout Options, does this make any difference?

Otherwise, perhaps you could try sending the case manufacturer a DXF or DWG?  I think truetype fonts are exported properly in those formats.  Or, worst case, if you've already got access to CorelDraw or somesuch, replace the text there, using the text from Altium's PDF as a guide, and save as a new PDF?

Yes whether I check that box or not makes no difference so I'm not sure what that option does. Regarding the dxf when I go to export anything with true type fonts it just converts them to stroked fonts.

cheers

[snoopy]

Forget about the pdf format. I think the trick is is to convert it to a gerber file with no loss of resolution and then convert the gerber to a tif with the following utility.

http://home.exetel.com.au/adam.seychell/gerb2tiff.html

cheers

[snoopy]

Just to add to my findings I found this package called GerbMagic and it allowed me to convert from gerber to pdf without those nasty jaggered fonts  It can also accept Protel ASCII format and convert that as well

http://www.bronzware.com/GerbMagic/index.htm

cheers

[BrianHG]

Ok, I know this topic has slept for awhile...

    In Altium's predecessor, Protel99SE, using a system printer driver print & PDFCreator's printer driver creates perfectly smooth curves at any zoom level when printing PCBs and schematics.

     PDFCreator acts as a system available printer and allows printing to a .pdf at full quality, or, a .png / .tiff /.bmp photo at any resolution you set it for.

http://www.pdfforge.org/pdfcreator

It's 100% free, no trials or watermarks, though it allows you to add your own watermarks to your .pdf creation which may be a useful feature...

[T3sl4co1l]

FYI, the "Use TT Fonts" option forces the default font (usually Arial) in place of the vector (stroke, serif, sans) font used for text objects on the PCB.

It's usually a bad idea because it breaks alignment.

Objects that are already TT fonts are unaffected, hence no change on the above issue.

Tim

[mikehoopes]

I've found that Altium's internal PDF font rendering is very puzzling; actual TTF content is "outlined" (converted to dumb vectors), and stroke converted to TTF is rendered as actual embedded fonts.

Stroke -> TTF is difficult to deal with, due to non-WYSIWYG screen visualization, and stroke fonts are approximately 180% taller than TTF, if one just changes any text from one to the other.

Using PDF Exchange 4.0 (version I have) doesn't produce better results for me - TTF is still "outlined" when present in the design. Plus, Hard Copy Output Containers can't name files using special strings. Thus, I use Stroke (with TTF for text on mech layers, and TTF for text on the Overlay layers.