PDF in CD10

[ewiser]

I am a newbie with CD wanted to know how everyone felt about the PDF function. This looks really usefull to me. Is There any tips on How to best use this feature.

[ewiser]

I am a newbie with CD wanted to know how everyone felt about the PDF function. This looks really usefull to me. Is There any tips on How to best use this feature.

[Peter Clifton]

Ed

PDF is a great way to distribute your drawings to other people who do not have CorelDRAW.

The in built PDF features of CorelDRAW are quite comprehensive, but sometimes the file sizes it creates are very big.

I use a full copy of Adobe Acrobat, I have a drawing that although it is visually complex, in graphics primatives terms it is simple, all it consists of is a lot of closed curves with uniform fills. I posted a GIF version of the file here.

CorelDRAW produces a PDF of this drawing that is around 6 megabytes in size. If I use Acrobat Distiller then the file size is around 200 kilobytes. The native Draw file is around 400 kilobytes in size when saved with compression enabled.

I can ZIP the Corel created PDF to a much smaller size, around 300 kilobytes, but it is clear that it is not creating a native optimized PDF. I strongly suspect that Corel is acutally producing a Post Script type print file and putting a wrapper around it that allows the Acrobat reader to correctly load the file.

Peter

[ewiser]

Peter which type of PDF are you using. I noticed that there is a web PDF save option is that the one that you saved the file with?

[Peter Clifton]

Ed

You will have to forgive me, I'm not sitting in front of Draw 9 at the moment.

In Draw 9 I was using the Publish as PDF option, as if you were creating PDF files for distribution and printing.

Note: In the Corel 10 newsgroups there have been posts regarding the PDF file size using this option in Draw 10 so I believe the limitation still exists, even though I don't own a copy of Draw 10.

I am not intending to knock the PDF export features of Draw, they can be (and are) really useful and sometimes the file sizes are acceptable. It is just that if I was relying on the PDF format in a commercial environment I would still invest in a copy of the full Adobe Acrobat suite.

All of the optimization features available in the Publish to PDF dialogue boxes, refer to bitmaps, not vectors so I could not find away to reduce the PDF size using just Corel DRAW.

To reiterate, the PDFs produced directly using CorelDRAW 9/10 are valid and can be opened and printed using the freely available Acrobat reader, it's just that sometimes the PDFs are large if they contain a lot of vectors, like my example (bitmaps and text are ok).

All that said I have recently been looking into the freeware packages AFPL Ghostscript and the associated viewer / manipulator program GhostGum GS-View. You can find links to the packages here: www.ghostscript.com

If you set up the Adobe PostScript printer driver with print to file option. You can create a print file of the drawing from Draw and use the above software suite to produce a reasonably compact PDF from the PostScript print file.

Peter

[This message was edited by Peter Clifton on June 29, 2001 at 06:07.]