Converting to PDF?

[OrbitzXT]

My contracting business often gets ".pln" files which are basically plan files. Currently I use a program called NitroPDF to convert them all to PDF. The quality of the converted PDF is fairly poor. Could anyone recommend another program to convert to PDF? Adobe Acrobat doesn't do it sadly.

 

[entropy13]

Try this?

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

Do you open the files?

If you can open the files and print them then you can install PDFCreator. The program installs a virtual printer that will "print" a document into a pdf.

Here's the sourceforge link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

 

[newtekie1]

Maybe give CutePDF a try. As long as you have some other program that can open the PLN file and print it, CutePDF can create a PDF from it.

Edit: entropy13 beat me to it.

 

[entropy13]

Don't forget to set PDFCreator as the default printer. Hmm this reminds me...I'm using it but haven't included it in the big list.

 

[OrbitzXT]

The program to view the PLN files is not very well developed. I'd have to open them one at a time and print each one individually. That would take too much time considering the amount of files. With NitroPDF, I'm able to "Combine" them and just select all the PLN files I want. The only issue is the quality. They actually print okay, but they don't look very good at all while viewing on the computer. You need to be at 100% zoom for it to be clear, being zoomed out even the slightest makes things unreadable.

 

[digibucc]

i was able to open a pln file in libreOffice Draw, and they have an export to pdf feature (not print). it should give you a higher quality pdf, you can also print to pdf if export for some reason isn't better.
let me know if the quality ends up being better than nitro. oh batch, yeah duh. forgot.

 

[Disparia]

Just in case... have you adjusted the PDF quality settings within NitroPDF?


Is the program ArchiCAD? Seems to get the most hits when looking up pln. According to the FAQ, it has had a built-in PDF generator since version 11. There's also a free API DevKit. May be more trouble than it's worth to create a batch converter add-on which talks to ArchiCAD, but I'll put it out there any way.

 

[digibucc]

Just in case... have you adjusted the PDF quality settings within NitroPDF?


Is the program ArchiCAD? Seems to get the most hits when looking up pln. According to the FAQ, it has had a built-in PDF generator since version 11. There's also a free API DevKit. May be more trouble than it's worth to create a batch converter add-on which talks to ArchiCAD, but I'll put it out there any way.

it sounds like he doesn't have archicad, and it's not cheap - they would need them sent from whoever as pdfs, and i doubt they are willing to ask whoever sends them. you are right though, that's what i came up with too.

 

[Disparia]

Ah, I suppose if they don't need to modified the pln, they don't have the app, just a viewer. Doh.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArchiCAD

Looks like there's no viewer (from them), they expect you to run in demo mode where printing is still enabled. Might be able to open all the files and print all to PDF?

 

[W1zzard]

adobe acrobat installs a printer driver too

can your viewer program export to any image format? can you right click the pln files and select print or other commands?

 

[digibucc]

you may consider converting to another format, like tiff. simply because there is a tool (though $30) here that says it can batch convert pln to tiff. then you can batch convert the tiffs to pdf - sounds bad but the difference being that tiffs will be higher quality than the pdfs nitro makes, and printing to pdf for example you will have control over the quality and then they should look better.

 

[micropage7]

why dont you try do pdf printer
http://www.dopdf.com/