PDF with layers?

My Stepdad is an experienced draughtsman but not that computer minded, and I'm trying to help him with an issue. Unfortunately I'm nowhere near the computer and am trying to help by explaining over the phone.

The issue is, he's got a new client and they are asking for drawings to be submitted in PDF format. Easy, I thought. We installed Cute PDF and successfully printed a drawing to PDF, but the quality is not that great, the small text is blocky when zoomed in.

The example provided by the client seemed to be a vector type PDF with layers you can switch on and off. You can zoom in to the smallest detail and the image displayed remains perfectly crisp.

My stepdad obviously doesn't want to submit a poor quality drawing, or ask how they produced theirs.

Does anyone know the best way to output high quality PDFs with layer support from Autocad 2000 LT? Free is good but he doesn't mind paying for the right product.

Any help is much appreciated

Try PDF995. It's a free download at PDF995.com. It does a pile of stuff, and they have two companion programs that go along with it that are also free that allow you to edit pdfs and do digital signatures. If you try it and like it, for about 20 bucks you can upgrade all three to the supported versions and the nag screens go away. Plus you can get free email support for question and problems. They support any operating system all the way back to Windows ME so you should have no problems with it. You can read all about it at the website.

The distorted text is a problem even with the latest version of AutoCAD and PDF drivers on certain fonts. My suggestion is to play around with different fonts and find one that does create a nice clean text output. But also remember that once plotted, you cannot tell at all the text is distorted.

Also check the Plot dialog box for some quality settings. I can't remember 2000 LT's settings, but I do know that Paperspace was introduced around that time so their should be something that allows you to adjust the output quality (eg. low, medium, high resolutions).

It could very well be that 2000 has some OLD font definitions in it.

I've had excelent results with AutoDesk TrueView. It's a free download from the AutoDesk site. Just open the drawing with TrueView and plot as if it were AutoCAD. I get clean, crisp pdf's complete with layer on/off control that can be changed within the pdf document itself. TruView can also convert dwg from one release of AutoCAD to another. Comes in handy at times.

Actually, that's a really good tip. Using TrueView gets you the latest plot configurations as the latest version of AutoCAD. And it's free!!