Dashed lines

[morrieg]

I need to make PDFs of my drawings containing dashed lines. If I "print" and save as PDF, the dashed lines come out solid. The only way I can get the dashed lines to show up is to export to PNG or some other bitmap format. Is there some other trick I'm missing?

[Alfred Scott]

Morrie,

The dashes are all there but the gaps in the dashes are so small they disappear.

Try using the Dash Adjuster tool in WildTools to fix this.

Alfred

[morrieg]

OK, that works. I can live with that, but I'm forced to make my dashes a bit bigger than I'd like.

[morrieg]

Is there any trick to make dashes with smaller gaps to show up in a PDF file? The gaps show up perfectly if I convert to JPEG or PNG.

[Alfred Scott]

Morrie,

As I recall, the gaps have to be more than 1pt because, believe it or not, it’s a limit of QuickDraw.

You can find any number of dashed lines in the StyleTools palette.

Alfred

[PeterKona]

Is there any trick to make dashes with smaller gaps to show up in a PDF file? The gaps show up perfectly if I convert to JPEG or PNG.

Are you reducing the image in some way such as not printing at 100% or printing a portion of the file, reduce to fit? I haven't had an issue with dashes on most print to pdf, but if I print reduce to print, some dashes might not show.

[morrieg]

The problem occurred when my page size was 8.5x11 and my drawing was roughly D-size, and I did a print window/fit to page so the entire drawing was shrunk to a letter-size page. Alfred said the lower limit on dash size was 1 pt but I don't think my dashes or the gaps were that small even when shrunken down, but this gave me a clue what to do. To work around this, I set my page size to be 26x33 and did a print window/fit to page, so the dashes showed up. But the page was too big to print, of course, and Acrobat won't scale down a large sheet to fit in a smaller page. But Preview does. So I opened the resulting PDF file in Preview, and did a print/save to PDF to letter size paper with scale-to-fit set. This shrunk everything down to the size I wanted with the dashes remaining.