Line art for instruction manuals created from Pro-Engineer?

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to create line art from Pro-E
models?



Thanks -

 

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to create line art from Pro-E
models?


If you take a look under 'File>Save a copy' and look in the dropdown list, you should see quite a few graphic type files. I've also used screen captures from a model shown in "no hidden line" view. And I've used similar techniques on drawing views which have more techniques for showing such things as cross sections, explodes of assemblies and dimensioning. And drawings readily produce line art. I've lately taken to producing a lot more such art work, whether line art of colored graphics, in PDF since it preserves, through postscript, the vector format of the original. This makes the line art scalable without the degreadation of raster formats like TIFF or JPEG when scaled up for printing or enlargement on the page.

David Janes

 

Thank-you very much David.


How do you create the PDF files from the Pro-E drawings?

I do have Acrobat (5.0), but I do not understand the steps I would
need to take to save Pro-E drawings as PDF files.

 

Thank-you very much David.


How do you create the PDF files from the Pro-E drawings?

I do have Acrobat (5.0), but I do not understand the steps I would
need to take to save Pro-E drawings as PDF files.

I've done it a few different ways and it much depends on what rev of the software you're using. WF3 now has an icon and built-in script to produce a Postscript file and send it to Adobe Distiller which produces the PDF then opens it in Adobe Reader from which you can save the PDF.

Previous versions were a little more cumbersome but followed essentially the same work flow: produce a Postscript file, run Distiller to convert it to PDF, open with Reader.

The tricky part is that producing the Postscript file is NOT a function of 'Save a Copy', but a Print function:
a.. Click the Print icon
b.. Click the plus sign/down arrow to get the Destination dropdown list
c.. Select one of the PostScript drivers (Generic or Generic Color), depending on whether you want color or not
d.. Check the 'To File' box, uncheck the 'To Printer' box
e.. Check which pages you want to include in your PDF; it will put multisheet drawings in a single file
f.. Click OK and you'll get the plot output file listed as <filename>.plt which I usually change to .ps and check the destination directory by doing 'Browse'. This is usually to your working directory unless you're in an Intralink session, then, it's to your workspace or any destination you browse to.
g.. Click OK and the file is printed
h.. The last step is to use Distiller or an Opensource equivalent to convert the Postscript file to PDF.
One way to somewhat automate this process is to set up Distiller to "watch" a certain directory for Postscript files that get placed there and when it detects one, to run it's conversion with some default settings, including saving the PDF in an output directory. An additional, fairly advanced automation step would be, from the printer configuration interface, save a PCF file which would be listed in the destination drop down which would fill in all the configuration options, list a destination file/directory and call a printer.cmd file to execute the plot. This is all covered somewhere in the Help "Fundamentals" or "Installation and Administration" document.

David Janes