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