Datasheet

5
■ WORKING WITH AUTOCAD 2011 DRAWINGS
Note: If you do not follow “clean” drafting practices in CAD, your job in Photoshop will be much harder. It is
best to spend some time in CAD cleaning up legacy drawings before working on them in Photoshop.
Setting Up a Printer Driver and Paper Size in AutoCAD
AutoCAD is fundamentally a vector program, meaning it stores entities as mathemati-
cal objects by using a spatial coordinate system. Lines are stored as end points that are
located by their x-, y-, and z-coordinates in space. To convert this vector data to pixels,
you need to set up an image printer driver. After you “print” the drawing, the entities
from CAD end up as black pixels on a white background in a raster image.
The following procedure doesn’t actually print on a real device; you are merely
setting up a virtual “printer” to export raster data from AutoCAD. These steps need to
be performed only once. After you configure the image printer driver and its associated
custom paper-size file, you can use these steps as often as you’d like to export images
from AutoCAD. If you are a CAD manager, you can copy the driver files you set up here
onto your file server and have all AutoCAD users in your organization reference them.
To set up a virtual printer, follow these steps:
1. In AutoCAD, type PLOTTERMANAGER and press Enter to open the folder
containing plot drivers.
2. Double-click the Add-A-Plotter-Wizard (as shown in Figure 1.2).
Figure 1.2 Plotter driver folder
3. On the Introduction screen, click Next to open the Begin screen.
4. Leave the My Computer radio button selected and click Next, as shown in
Figure 1.3, to open the Plotter Model screen.
5. Click Raster File Formats in the Manufacturers list, and then select the Portable
Network Graphics PNG (LZH Compression) option in the Models list (Figure 1.4).
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