forum.datacad.com

Hey all. I have several clients that are using Bluebeam and a constant complaint is that my PDF's are not searchable. Has anyone found a process for making Bluebeam searchable PDF's directly from DataCAD 17?

Thanks in advance.

I don't know of a way to get searchable PDF's directly out of Datacad, but depending on your font, they should be able to do OCR processing on your files to make them searchable. I use PDF Xchange Editor to do this here and it works well with TTF and SHX fonts as long as the characters are fairly distinctive and similar to a normal typeset as far as spacing and clarity goes.

With the mention of PDF xChange Editor, I will give a shout out for that program. Been using it for about a year and it hands down whips Adobe Acrobat (full version) right off the PDF planet. Very easy interface and ions more toolbar icons that are all very useful and immediately available without having to click through a series of menus. I also use it to digitally sign and seal drawings to send in for building permits. There is a free version but the "unfree" Editor version (it contains more stuff) runs $48 a year for a license and after DataCAD, I would value it as the best piece of software in my computer. The purchase of one license allows it to be installed on two machines so that makes the value all the better.

Perhaps the text (vector) is being converted to bitmaps. I think most pdf printing software can be setup to print all content as bitmps.