How to make a pdf display as well in Acrobat as it does in InDesign

I had this problem for a bit, as it was automatically PDFing at 72 DPI, and there was no way to change the setting. What I ended up needing to do was installing cutePDF, a free pdf writer, and using that as my “print to” setting. That seemed to solve the problem for me.

Good Luck

There are at least a dozen ways to get from A to B in what you’re trying to do, and unfortunately what works for one person won’t always work for everyone else. A coworker and I had two very different methods for doing this and neither of us could ever get the other’s to work but our own process worked fine every time.

Nick’s link suggestion is the first thing that comes to mind – if the pdf shows correctly in InDesign, the problem is with the InDesign to portfolio pdf process rather than the original CAD to pdf process (with one exception I’ll get to in a minute). If you double-click a link in the list, it should bring up the path it’s pointing to. If the path is wrong or empty, or if there is a question icon instead of a file icon, the link is broken. To be absolutely sure the link is working, you can always just relink them all. But the fact you can see a higher quality version in InDesign indicates to me that your links are probably fine.

When you generate the pdf, you mentioned you turned off compression but there are other settings (include original images, leave out files under a certain size, etc.). Saving as a pdf, exporting to pdf, and printing to pdf also all generate very different results. And sometimes weird things just happen – the simpler you can keep your process and file/file components, the better off you’ll be all around.

Vector linework should scale without issue. However if your CAD pdf is image based and you are scaling them up in InDesign, that could also cause what you’re seeing. I tend not to think this is the issue however, since you can see a good quality version with the right view settings in InDesign. Personally, if I’m significantly changing the scale of a CAD drawing to put it in a document, I’ll take the generated pdf into Photoshop and convert it to an image format rather than leave it as a pdf.

Unfortunately it’s a really complex process no matter how simple you try to make it. When the usual suspects don’t solve the issue, it can be very difficult to troubleshoot if you don’t have the original files.

One thing does catch my eye as I re-read the thread: are you saying that if you generate a pdf from CAD, that pdf looks different when opened with Acrobat as compared to placed in InDesign? Or it looks different after you run in through InDesign to create a second generation pdf?

I wouldn’t scale in indesign…set up the correct page size in your plot layout in cad or create new sheets to the appropriate size and make sure your printing at high quality from cad.

You can insert the pdf or flatten it in photoshop first and link a raster image (jpeg), which adds a step but ensures what you see is what you get.

Anyone ever tried opening a portfolio or map via slow internet connection, waiting for each layer in the pdf to render? It’s annoying and unnecessary.

That said, are you sure you need your details to be 300+ dpi?