Course Setting in OCAD8

[Nails]

nah just me being a dick don't worry about it.

[Steve]

I'm trying to get the control descriptions from all my exported courses into pdf files etc for uploading on the club website prior to the event.

What I have found so far is not perfect.

Either - export the course as a high dpi image and crop what is not wanted, change to black & white, then import into word or pdf. Phew, result is good but not perfectly sharp.

Or - copy the exported course file to a new name and remove everything expect the CDs and then print to pdf. The image sharpness is great but the colour is still magenta, and prints grey.

I know I can combine several CDs into one image / pdf file by importing several courses into a new file.

Is there a slicker way of doing all this? Apologies if the answer's on the forum somewhere but I couldn't find it.

Cheers

[Nails]

no theres not really any 'slicker' way of doing things unless you have adobe illustrator (which is unlikely?).

[Paul Frost]

There is an easy way.
You need to install a PDF printer. There are lots out there but the one I have used for a couple of years now is PDF995

This is free to use (you just get an advert pop-up during the process, just close it) or buy a license for $9.95.

What it does, is install a new virtual printer to your computer. So when you choose to print anything if you click the dropdown menu to select your printer you will now have one called PDF995. You can then set the properties for it just like any other printer (paper size, dpi, etc.). When you click PRINT it will ask where you want to save the file, then open the finished PDF in Adobe Reader.

In OCAD go to PRINT CONTROL DESCRIPTIONS, select the PDF printer from the printers dropdown menu, set the properties, select all the courses, Copies =1, then print. You then get 1 of each course as many will fit per page.

There is a companion product pdfedit995 that allows you to do lots more things to manipulate the PDF's created.

The ability to create PDF's is very useful for event fliers as well, some people don't like opening WORD documents (because of the virus risk). PDF's are safe and viewable on most platforms.

[Steve]

Thanks guys

yeah I have pdf995, but I'm trying to extract exported courses and OCAD (8.13) is not offering me the option to print control descriptions.

Sounds like pdfedit995 is worth investigating though.

Steve

[Paul Frost]

Perhaps I'm missing something.
Why are you messing about with exported courses?
If you want to have control descriptions available for people to print off from your website, what is wrong with my suggestion?
I have a demo only version of OCAD 8.12 and that does throw an error when I try to print because of the 1000 object limit (are you using a demo version?).
I now have a full OCAD 9 license so can't tell if the problem is the same in the demo version of 9, but you could try downloading 9 and trying it.
Or get someone with a full version to create the PDF, ( PM me if you need help).

[swat]

I have OCAD 8.13 and 'Print control descriptions' is in the File menu (right under 'Print'). I have installed a patch for OCAD 8 - maybe that's what you are missing?

[Steve]

I also have installed the 8 to 8.13 upgrade, and yes, I can print control descriptions from the course file. But when I export courses the option disappears. I needed to export courses to add warnings about road crossings, because modifying the CDs in the course file appears not be possible (this came up before in this topic).
I have got some excellent results by importing images into Word, however converting to pdf (using pdf995) there is a slight loss of quality.
I'm unwilling to try v9 because the event is only 2 weeks away and the controller has agreed everything.

[Neil M35]

Or - copy the exported course file to a new name and remove everything expect the CDs and then print to pdf. The image sharpness is great but the colour is still magenta, and prints grey.

I know I can combine several CDs into one image / pdf file by importing several courses into a new file.

This is more or less what I did for an event I planned recently. Having got all the CDs into a separate file I then changed the colour definitions so that the colour called magenta was in fact black. This gave a much more satisfactory printout. Unfortunately I only discovered this after photocopying all the descriptions in grey. Not very slick - there must be an easier way.

[Steve]

Ahhh... define purple as black. Neil you're a hero.

[Paul Frost]

Sorry, I hadn't realised that you neded to edit them before printing.

OCAD 9 is much better in that respect, adding text blocks to descriptions is very easy now.