Hi Rob, first just one reply to this part:

> If I save straight out of archicad IE the whole file I get these
> funny crop marks that must be hidden in the PDF but MOI
> reads them.

I tried loading in the PDF file that you attached there (Untitled2.pdf), and I couldn't see any kind of crop marks in there...

So I guess that file must have been one with that sub-section export? Can you please also attach one that has visible crop marks so I can take a look at that?

- Michael

Hi Rob - PDF is normally meant for holding printed page output, so I just was not expecting to get one that is set up in Meters, since is unusual to have a printer that prints out pages many meters across.

Unfortunately PDF files do not really contain a marker in them for what units were used to save the file - instead they are always set up using a unit system called "Points", where 1 Point = 1/72 of an inch.

The way it works currently in MoI is that if you have your unit system set to either Millimeters, Centimeters, or Inches at the time that you do the import, then MoI will preserve the scale for you and translate from "Points" to your current unit system.

Otherwise MoI will assume that you are not interested in preserving the units and instead will just scale all values in the PDF file by 1/20 so that the import won't be using numbers like x=600, y=1500 which are common values to see in a typical file, but which turn out to be rather large for the way that MoI is set up.

I guess you are using PDF more as a data transfer mechanism in this case rather than as a printing target like it is more normally used for?

Anyway, hopefully the above explanation will give you enough information to clear up what you are seeing.

Unfortunately, if I were to try to preserve units when someone had their units set to meters, it would probably be confusing to some other people since their page would import at a quite small size since normally a printed page is a lot smaller than even 1 meter in size.

- Michael

Thanks for the explanation Michael. Yes it looks like i attached the pdf without the crop marks so attaching one with and the 3dm showing it imported. I guess it's no biggie changing down the units for import just as long as i remember! But getting a consistent origin point (and close to the moi one) is important. I have drawn a box around the line drawings in archicad and using that to draw my marquee round for export (only exports that area) however what happens if the drawing expands beyond that box at a later date - I will have to grow the box and possibly not get the imported file in the same place? Also It would be nice to have a system that possibly combined the import function (for 2d line type formats such as pdf) with the image import function so we could use some of the same functions - like show in ortho only, even adjusting transparency after all they are being used in a similar way - as blueprints to construct from. I think the update drawing request (raised by someone in another thread) is a great one as these things get updated all the time and it's a pain replacing all the old drawings on each view not to mention the increased scope for an error. Hope this can get included too.

Thanks again..................Got a couple of more requests/suggestions too but i'll start another thread for that one! ;-)

Cheers

Hi Rob,

> Yes it looks like i attached the pdf without the crop marks
> so attaching one with and the 3dm showing it imported.

Yup, it certainly looks like it has crop marks in it...

They seem to be just a part of the file, I guess you would need to ask the Archicad people why those are exported - I see them also when viewing the file in Adobe Acrobat Reader, so they just seem to be part of what was written out to the file.

Here is a screenshot of what I see when viewing your PDF in Adobe Reader, I've circled the visible crop marks here in red:



Do you see something different than that when viewing the PDF on your machine?


> But getting a consistent origin point (and close to
> the moi one) is important.

It looks like you've got a multi-page PDF there... Is there any way for you to generate just a single page one instead of multi-page? It is possible that will be better behaved as it will have less kinds of fancy transforms in it.

Otherwise you may need to place a reference line in your drawing that starts at the origin, that will give you a reference point that you can snap on to in MoI to drag your drawing to snap it to the origin in MoI, making for a proper origin alignment.


> Also It would be nice to have a system that possibly combined
> the import function (for 2d line type formats such as pdf) with
> the image import function so we could use some of the same
> functions

Unfortunately it would be quite difficult to accomplish this - PDF is not remotely an easy format to work with, it can contain a variety of different kinds of entities inside it, like various kinds of bitmaps, text, paths, multiple pages, all with different kinds of encoding and compression on them, etc... MoI's PDF reader is pretty basic and only attempts to grab out any path information it can possibly find and does not understand how to handle things like embedded bitmaps. It would really take a very intensive effort to try to fully process a PDF file in a complete way.

- Michael