10eighty

Hey Adam, I had posted my original problem on the FB group. When I posted here I had actually removed one of the possible factors, but the problem still remained. @Renerabbitt, the GOAT ;-), commented on the FB group and had mentioned that... "you will run into limitations in the PDF print drivers for things like this regardless of the software being used. PDF format has been long due for a serious overhaul..its very old tech with mild revisions through the years" There are a lot of things going on when we are choosing line weights in plan view and sending saved plan views to layout. Probably some redundancies, and maybe contradictions of what we are trying to have produced. Everything I send out is printed through "Chief Architect Save As PDF" and physically printed at one of our local print shops. 80% is submitted digitally at this point and the governing entity will mark up and return the PDF's for print. I usually go through my digital pdf's thoroughly to check that I didn't have the electrical layer set to 18 or something like that. I try and make sure everything is crisp before I send the digital pdf in for review. If the Digital PDF is clean, usually after it takes it course the prints end up clean. Which brings up something I find very strange... I used to always set my DPI at like 600 thinking it was making a "crisper" PDF. I've had a couple massive plans that would be gargantuan size that I was having a hard time sending digitally due to the 20+mb file size. I digitally print everything at 144 DPI now and my file sizes are small and I can't seem to notice the lack in quality. I bring this up because if I had a large format printer, I think I would send everything out of chief to digital PDF, and then sent the digital PDF to the plotter. It would help isolate the line weight discrepancies. But it sounds like you have been doing that and it still is behaving strangely. And my situation seemed to be entirely based on adding a break to my layout box. Once I "simplified the polygon" all the weird transparency issues went away. Hopefully this post will save somebody hours of keyboard head banging. Cheers,

And now it is printing to PDF the way I was expecting

I'm not sure if this answer is helpful, but I will make polylines over the counter tops and then make a polyline the size of the specific slab size. Then I can Tetris the countertop pieces on to the slab to figure out how many slabs I need. And Fab is per foot, so I can macro label each countertop piece and do some math. Cheers,

Hey guys, I was wondering if any of you guys might know why my PDF's are showing up transparency gray while the print preview is showing up the way I would like the PDF to show. I have spent hours trying to figure out what might be causing it. Everything looks great until it gets to PDF. Hopefully the pics explain the situation. It's basically the text boxes where I have transparency set to the fill, and the driveway which I also have set the same way. Thanks in advance. UPDATE..... Just in case anybody runs into this situation. So after pretty much attempting to eliminate any possible cause, I ended up creating a new layout file and adding each item until the problem occurred. It would seem that when I break my saved plan view layout box to fill in some of the blank areas in the layout page (why not, I thought it looked cool), it seems to be causing the gray in the layout box. Bring it back to a rectangle and whalla, back to how I want it to look. I don't have time to dig in further right now, But I will later and update this post.

I can imagine... I don't have to do them often, but load calcs keep coming up. I've been just doing a basic schedule with simple spreadsheet for the circuits. Thought i'd poke around and see what you studs have been doing. Hope you are well buddy.

Good morning Rene. Out of curiosity, how advanced is this custom schedule? and do you have it for sale by chance? Cheers

Holy BALLS!!!!!! What kinda sorcery is this??? LOL. Damn @Alaskan_Son I hate to admit that while I sent off my coordinates to be uploaded, I accidentally opened up a door to pandora's box of Macros. Very interesting! with a stupid rough learning curve I might add! I have purposely been avoiding this door for obvious reasons. I will probably reach out to you tomorrow. I would like to learn more!

@Alaskan_Son k, huge relief! Wish I could Venmo you a nice cold IPA to help mend the fence . I'll be on my best behavior from here on out!

Yikes! Signature is changed. This hadn't occurred to me, but your point is well noted. The last thing I want to do is waste your guys time, and @solver has bailed me out more than once. Did I downvote somebody somehow? If so I can assure you it was by accident. I truly appreciate this discussion group! Cheers,

I might be getting somewhere????? lol. Wonder how I get the macros to change the point number. hmmmmm And Chopsaw, every once and a while when you end up with those difficult not flat lots, using a total station does a remarkable job getting your exact locations. When I did this several years ago, the foundation guy wanted 3' offsets on each corner so he could "square everything up". So instead of shooting 50 points, it turned into 150. and at the end of the day, the "actual" corners I shot turned out so good he didn't even use the offsets. Once you can get the coordinates in a CSV file, the place you rent the station from will upload them and you just need to shoot them. Cheers,

Hey Chopsaw, Fortunately, I have a local outfit that I can rent a total station from. $100/day for the non-robotic, and $250/day for the robotic. The non-robotic is the one I have used in the past but it takes two people and a bit of time. But small investment to get super accurate corner locations. And good call on the macros

Man!!!!! every time I think I'm getting good with this program I turn another corner and realize I don't know as much as I had hoped. Macros you say lol... All I really need to do is get the coordinates of these points into a CSV file. That being said, it wouldn't suck to have this little diagram with some labels as to which point is where. Any recommendations on which training video a guy might watch to get some basics on "semi" simple macros? And no, I am actually using x11 currently. Thanks for the response Michael

And as an update, I have been successful in exporting my site plan into AutoCAD 2017. Then placing points on my building corners. Using the "data extraction" in AutoCAD I am able to convert the point coordinates into an Xls file. I think I will be able to re-sort the data into the ASCII format for the total station. Stay tuned ...

Hey guys, Does anybody have any suggestions for importing point coordinates into a total station? Several years ago I had a program called Traverse PC in which I drew up a house outline and gave it a reference point and uploaded the info into a Nikon total station and staked out a 10,000 S.F. house. It worked super well, but I can't seem to find the software. So now I am looking for a simple way to put the point coordinates into an ASCII format to upload them. I created a layer set with just my CAD (from the surveyor) site plan, and located one of the property pins as X-0 Y-0, and started putting point markers on the corners of the building envelope, but the point markers don't seem to be showing up coordinates in the control e dialog box. I was thinking of just doing a very minimal layer set and exporting to CAD and then trying to find a way to export the point coordinate information to ASCII format to upload to the total station. Just thought I'd run it by you guys in case anybody has done anything similar. And I should probably add that I am not a licensed surveyor. I am building a house where the rear property pins are 30' down a steep embankment. I want to locate my building corners accurately so I can modify and redesign my foundation plan with steps to accommodate a daylight basement. Due to the elevation drop, we can't really stake this thing out even close to accurate. I will also add, that I have done this before and all of my 150 points were within a dime. Thanks in advance, Randy