The transfer of CAD documents to a more readily available archiving and viewing format has become very popular. The PDF (Portable Document Format) is intended to support free distribution of documents without the need to install applications or special viewers each time. If all documents are stored as PDF files then only one application need to be available: the PDF "Reader".
Normally, when working with letters, presentations etc. it is sufficient to use the standard method of PDF generation - to "print" to PDF. This is fine if only a few documents need to be converted this way but it is completely useless if thousands of drawings need converting.
This is where the PDFAssistant comes in.
The key to generating PDF files is first to create PostScript (printer) files - with correct orientation and drawing format. This is the hard part. PDFAssistant does this job for you. The easy part is the creation of PDF files from PostScript files. This is normally achieved by using a "distiller".
The PDFAssistant has two modes of operation: batch (menu-based) and command-line (macro-based).
For more details on operation take a look at the instruction guide.
An example of menu-based operation is shown here:
When the PostScript generation routine is complete, it is possible to check the status of the PDF files by clicking on "PDF Size". A macro will then display the size of any PDF versions of the listed files.
To run PDFAssistant in command-line mode you simply write the name of the macro and the file name you wish to convert. For example:
GENERATE_POSTSCRIPT "myfile.mi" "myfile.pdf"
Before you know it, ME10 will have created a new file "myfile.ps" ready to be converted (automatically) to PDF.
A PDF-distiller will also be required. The most common product in use is Adobe Acrobat.