Nicinus

Me too. That's the thing with pdfs, they are a file in a vector based format, written in a language called postscript that defines circles, fonts, etc, instead of saving them as an image/bitmap.

Not in vector graphics. Choose a text and zoom in as much as you can, it will always stay sharp in your pdf.

Ok, that makes sense. Still, what I don't get is the wobbliness of the lines? Even if it is created by a 3D object that object is also conformed by vectors, right? I understand that a curve has visible segments but it should still be clean in my mind. Have a look at similar example from Revit. I've also included an Archicad example but they use another route. The first one is a sample chief scene I downloaded, the second ARchicad and the last one Revit. These are all from my previous work so I know they are 3D objects as well, but in Archicad's case the 3D symbol includes a 2D version that is substituted in plans, creating extremely clean drawings.

It doesn't seem to be that simple. Have a look at the below images, one printed at 4000 and the other at 72 dpi. Looking at these examples the difference is dramatic, and all in the quality of the actual curve and how it is drawn. If I would print from Illustrator and have a really low dpi setting those curves would start to look pixelated like an antialiasing problem, but here the setting really affects the definition of the curve itself. As you can see the lines themselves are very crisp. This then gets accentuated when one starts to add line weight, all these examples are with the line weight being 1.

This I don't understand, how was the circle in the symbol created then if not with the CAD tools?

Not a problem at all, Greg, I'm grateful for all help and suggestions. You are talking about something different though, and what can happen after a pdf has been created and if you want to convert that pdf to an image. My issues are in the creation of the actual pdf. The pdfs created by CAD software is typically in vector format, as opposed to for example Photoshop that handles images and bitmaps.

Electormen, while I don't pretend to understand all of this I did program some stuff in postscript when I was younger. Normally a vector program like Chief translates it's info into postscript for a resolution independent pdf. For all typical purposes dots and pixels are the same for a computer. Dpi in this case (Chief) really seems to relate more to the interpolation of curves, and the quality difference is dramatic in 72 dpi compared to 4000 if you zoom in. However, Chief is not converting everything into a bitmap when creating pdfs. As you say yourself, a 300pdi Arch D would be 78Mpixels, or about a 624MB uncompressed grayscale file, which even with 99% compressed would be 6.24MB. My 4000 dpi Arch D pdf is 178Kb and if you zoom in on for example text you can see that no matter how much you zoom in, the text is perfect, no pixelization. Same goes for a CAD circle (which has been defined as a circle). Everything else that uses curves is dependent on interpolation, i.e. how many segments the curve consists of. Back to Chief. Symbols and architectural blocks are highly dependent on the dpi setting and my results got better when I chose 4000. I'm not using any bitmaps though and can imagine that this would possibly generate large files. It seems as if one of my questions on why two pages looks so different is related to scaling of line weight, since when I look at the object properties the annotation set is the same. However, there does not seem to be a way to see what scaling line weight was used after it has been sent? I can't find anything that seems to relate in properties. This seems to indicate that I would really have to tailor to specific printers, whereas I would like to create one high quality Arch D pdf and be done with it.

It's probably partially me not understanding some of the concepts, but I see these issues already in Layout, even before it's been sent to print/pdf. Have a look at the below for some line work I believe should be better. Maybe it's the internal precision in Chief, if you look at this zoom of a roof edge, some of the lines goes of in another direction. It may seem picky, but it does distract a clean drawing. It seems to me that it is related to line weight and the way Chief simulates thicker lines. I used the override of a line weight of 1 and everything looks more straight and circles more round as below. I did run into another issue though, where I seem to have sent two pages differently, as one is hair light and the other somewhat thicker. Both are drawn without jaggedness though, but I can't figure out what I made different. I've included the layout file if anyone would care to take a look at what is different between page 1 and 2? Looking at some of the lines I would guess they have different annotation sets or scale, but I can't figure out where I can find that info in Layout and both takes me to the same view if I double click them. Test.layout

Just to make sure I looked in another PDF viewer and it is the same, it's definitely the way it comes from Chief. Scaling issue perhaps? I send to layout with 1/8" - 1'.

I don't understand how I set the resolution in Chief in order to get proper line quality. I'm working on my plan, exporting it to Layout on an Arch D, and then printing to pdf where I examine the result. I used 4000dpi which was the highest setting but the result is unimpressive to say the least, so I assume I'm doing something wrong. I've attached two screen shots of zooms on the pdf, one showing a jerky dining table coming from the library, and the other a crooked angled line of a roof outline. What gives?