The Géotech PDF Driver

Géotech has developed a Microstation plot driver that can be used to create documents in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) directly. This technology was originally used to provide the ViSit.Web environment with a technique for producing at-scale plots from a web-based client. Since that time, we have noted that a PDF driver is also a very useful tool to have on a CAD workstation. The GeoPDF plot driver provides a simple, robust tool for quickly creating PDF documents directly from the Microstation's plot/print interface, without the need for complex transformations or post-processes.

The GeoPDF plot driver is designed from the ground up to be integrated with Microstation and ViSit. As such, it has access to most to the graphic and logical features that are available from Microstation data. Below is a detailed list of the features of the GeoPDF plot driver.

• High fidelity representation of Microstation graphics.

  Since this is a Microstation plot driver it has access to all plotting features exposed by Microstation, including line styles and pen tables.

• Searchable text.

  Microstation's plot API provides support for non-stroked PostScript (type 1) fonts. This allows users to search for text strings in the resulting PDF document. Unlike many PostScript transformations utilities, the GeoPDF driver ensures that non-stroked text is properly clipped by attached reference files.

• Embedded links.

  It is often useful to embed hyperlinks in Microstation design files as engineering links. The GeoPDF driver will extract and expose these links as PDF hyperlinks if they are associated with a text or cell element. In addition, the embedded links are enumerated in the document outline tab. This provides a simple and effective way to access project documents directly from a PDF document.

• Raster support.

  The GeoPDF plot driver provides direct support for plotting raster and raster/vector documents.

• Compression.

  The PDF format provides support for various compression techniques. The GeoPDF driver can be configured to produce (FLATE) compressed or uncompressed documents.

Example

Click on the links below to view some example plots created with ViSit and the GeoPDF plot driver.

This example shows a typical PDF document created with Géotech's ViSit.Web application. In this case, the raster graphic is stored internally using JPEG compression. The title and date strings, as well as the compass point are all created at plot time by the server-side ViSit environment. Note that the text in this document is non-stroked. This allows users to look for locations using text searchs. For example, we can locate the "Allée Robert Kock" simply by searching for "Kock" with AcrobatReader's test search dialog.

ViSit
ViSit.Web
ViSit.Web Consultation
ViSit.Web Annotation
ViSit.Web Contribution

Géotech PDF Driver

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ViSit Géocomm
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