ANSI B printing and generating PDFs

RE: ANSI B printing and generating PDFs

eng101 — Wed, 25 May 2022 18:50:22 GMT

[quote userid="97550" url="~/products/manufacturers/altium/f/forum/51037/ansi-b-printing-and-generating-pdfs/197957#197957"]make sure your default Windows printer is pointing at a printer that is known to work with CS.[/quote]

Part of what I'm asking is if anyone can point me to a printer that is known to work with CS because it doesn't look like anything I have on my machine works and I've tried several, including the Microsoft Print to PDF and several third party PDF printers, along with the Xerox machine we have at the office.

RE: ANSI B printing and generating PDFs

tarribred61 — Wed, 25 May 2022 18:32:35 GMT

I edited my previous response a little. It is a good idea to have the default Windows printer be a printer that is known to work with CS before you do something that makes the outjob file. Else, the outjob gets tags for the printer and you cannot change them without creating a new outjob file (then you lose your configurations).

For whatever reason, the printer setup menus in CS do NOT seem to change all the various tags in the project and outjob files that tell it what printers to use and how to scale things.

RE: ANSI B printing and generating PDFs

tarribred61 — Wed, 25 May 2022 17:46:25 GMT

So sorry you are having problems. I recall having issues before that required deleting the outjob file. It also then required closing the project in CS and reopening it. But as you say, you tried that already without success. I don't know if the suggestions below will fix your problem but it may help learn something.

Something I can think of is to check on the PDF export settings. Screen shot below shows this. You access it with the File > System Preferences menu.

In my installation, I have one size for an 11x17 page. You might check what your settings are and set it up for page sizes you use if needed. Also, after doing this, close and restart CS just in case it is holding on to settings in the memory. You can make custom ones if you need to.

Next, open Windows Explorer and go to your project folder. Find the <project>.outjob file and rename it to add the text BACKUP (or some other prefix) in front of the project name.

Keep Windows Explorer window open and go to CS and then close the project (save any changes if requested).

[edits:) Before reopening the project, make sure your default Windows printer is pointing at a printer that is known to work with CS. Otherwise, when you reopen CS and generate a clean outjob file it will still use the problematic print driver. Also, if you had previously changed the project name by saving as a different file name, the outjob file associated with the project may have the older name based on the prior project name. That is, renaming a project with file > Save Project As... does not update the outjob file name. FWIW you can open the project PrjPcb file in a text editor and view all its settings. I haven't tried to edit these manually. The last line in the file in one of my projects has info related to the SmartPDF.

Then in CS reopen the project. Reopen one of the schematic pages. In the menus, choose Project > Generate Outputs. In the Windows Explorer window you should see it generate a new outjob file for the project.

Now, in the CS window for Generate output files, choose the Schematic Prints and Page setup. In my setup the scaling is 1.0. Set up this for Tabloid size, Fit Document On Page, Color and Landscape mode. Then close the pop-up window and try printing.

Note, I typically work with a C-size schematic sheet (17x22 inch) and print to B-size (11x17inch) without problems.

When doing all this, I notice that in my CS set up the available paper sizes had old sizes from some other printer driver. It didn't get an updated list until after I had renamed the outjob file and then closed and reopened the project.

Unfortunately, the outjob has to be setup again for all the other printouts in the PCB mode once you eliminate (rename or delete). However, since you renamed it you could always get it back by naming it back and restarting your project

RE: ANSI B printing and generating PDFs

eng101 — Wed, 25 May 2022 15:03:56 GMT

I appreciate the response, but I have no issues with printing single schematic sheets using Outputs > Print however this feature is only a single schematic page at a time and more importantly it does not contain the embedded component information (part number, vendor etc.). To get all schematic sheets in a single file along with the embedded component information you have to use the Projects > Generate Outputs > Schematic Prints dialog, and unfortunately this is the one that doesn't work.

RE: ANSI B printing and generating PDFs

bills_alsentis — Wed, 25 May 2022 14:06:23 GMT

So here's my process for creating B size Schematic sheets - if I follow this process, it seems to work every time......

Schematic Print/PDF Export (B Size Sheet):
- CS > Outputs Tab > Print
  - Select Microsoft Print to PDF
  - Cancel - Do Not print yet!
- CS > Outputs Tab > Page Setup:
  - Select Tabloid, Landscape, Fit, Color
- CS > Outputs Tab > Print > Microsoft Print to PDF > Properties
  - Select Landscape, Advanced > Paper Size > Tabloid
  - Print to the file
- Print the generated file to the printer using Adobe Acrobat Reader
  - Select Ledger under Page Setup in the lower left corner of the dialog

Cheers!

RE: ANSI B printing and generating PDFs

eng101 — Tue, 24 May 2022 15:42:25 GMT

RE: ANSI B printing and generating PDFs

eng101 — Tue, 24 May 2022 15:41:05 GMT

If I go to the "Outputs" toolbar and click "Print" > "Print Preview" the schematic shows up scaled incorrectly and placed in the wrong part of the sheet (top left corner), if I proceed to print it comes out fine. Unfortunately this method only gives me individual schematic sheets and they do not contain any embedded component information. According to some previous posts Altium says that this "Print Preview" error is indicative of a conflict between CircuitStudio and the installed printer driver, FWIW I've tried a lot of different printer drivers and none of them seem to help.

The "correct" way of creating a PDF with all of the schematic sheets in a single file and containing the embedded component information is to go to the "Project" toolbar, click "Generate Outputs" > "Schematic Prints", but this creates a PDF that looks just like the print preview (the schematic is scaled incorrectly and placed incorrectly on the sheet, but the sheet is the correct size). The scaling is set to "Fit Document On Page" and the paper size is set to "Tabloid". The paper sizes come from the printer driver, so I used to have an 11x17 but no longer do after changing the printer driver to try and solve this, FWIW Tabloid == 11x17 so it shouldn't really matter. If I change the scaling to try and "grow" the schematic image it actually splits it across multiple sheets, if I try to change the margin width it doesn't help, it seems like CircuitStudio thinks the schematic is actually taking up the entire sheet but it's not.

RE: ANSI B printing and generating PDFs

NHEE2 — Thu, 05 May 2022 19:26:42 GMT

Ok, had time to play so I took a look at this. I can easily cause a B size sheet to print on 4 sheets of a pdf files by NOT checking "fit document on page" in page setup in project outputs with schematic checked as the output.

Check the following and try your printing again.

1. make your sheet size match what you want for output (i..e. if you want 11x17 output, make the sheet 11x17)

2. in spite of the fact that your sheet is 11x17 and you may choose an 11x17 output device, I found that I still need to check "fit document on page" or else it will be broken up in the output file.

3. in the system settings, I also set pdf output to 11x17 but DID NOT explore where this takes effect.

So, be sure to make the sheet size match your output size and STILL, tell it to fit on one page as a precaution

added - What size is your output device ?

added - my apologies as I just saw your other replies. So you are looking for a searchable pdf, correct ? This is a function of the pdf output generator that Altium is using. There may be a means of accessing that, I'm not sure.

Good luck !

RE: ANSI B printing and generating PDFs

tarribred61 — Thu, 05 May 2022 19:26:19 GMT

Maybe you can post a screen shot of what your print config settings are?

RE: ANSI B printing and generating PDFs

eng101 — Thu, 05 May 2022 18:15:31 GMT

I appreciate the response, several other people are using it here without issue but I haven't been able to replicate their configuration or figure out what's different on mine so I don't believe it's an unsurmountable bug in the SW.

I can print the schematic pages individually to PDF and they scale fine, but using the "generate outputs" feature embeds the component data in a clickable PDF which is very useful for design reviews, this is primarily why I would like to get it working.

RE: ANSI B printing and generating PDFs

shabaz — Thu, 05 May 2022 18:06:45 GMT

I don't use CircuitStudio, but given you could be waiting an unspecified amount of time if it happens to be a bug then perhaps it is better to just live with working around the problem, since it appears Circuit Studio supports clipboard operations:

/products/manufacturers/altium/w/documents/4011/exporting-circuitstudio-schematics-to-svg-and-dxf

(i.e. copy-paste into Word or PowerPoint or Inkscape, and then drag to whatever scale you want, and print from there, or export from those applications to whatever format you wish).