I’ve been drawing up a letterhead in cad as it’s the only software I’ve got for that kind of thing

I have tried in the past to print to a jpeg using some free software, but I seem to lose quality

Is there any other way to do it? Or maybe I can convert it into something other that a jpeg?

in the command line, does ‘jpegout’ still work?

Screenshot and crop ?

jpegout works but the quality is rubbish. You could plot as a PDF, then use something like Gimp to export as jpeg?

There’s probably a quicker way around it though…

Is there an Export command?
In Sketchup you can export the drawing as a jpeg, perhaps there is similar..

What autocad version? There used to be an export to virtual printer or something similar and that had jpeg format. Or just do a screen grab but that’s a bit basic.

Why would you want a bitmap format for a letterhead? Send me the dxf, I’ll open it in illustrator save it out as an eps and/or pdf file and send it back. It’s a sub 5 minute job although I’m just about to pop to the shops so you’ll not get anything back much before lunchtime.

[edit] If you really want a jpeg I can save that format too.

Unless the letterhead has loads of colours (like a photo), then you need to export as something indexed e.g. BMP, TIFF or PNG or ideally the vector form e.g. PDF

Can you install a PDF printer driver on the PC and print to that to create the PDF?

Edit – what MuppetWrangler said

free download PDF printer drivers would work fine, if you can find a virtual printer driver on your disk then use TIFF as it supports lines better than JPG.

No experience of this in Acad but in microstation printing to a windows PDF driver will result in a raster file.
You need to export using the microstation PDF driver to produce a vector file.
Dont even know if Acad has its own drivers though.

You can print to tiff from autocad.

Requires setup though happy to do it for you if you send it to me.

Or…

Hit the big A in top left.
Hover on print
Manage plotters
Double click on add-a-plotter
Follow instructions.

I’ve just tried to PDF, even using the highest resolution it loses a lot of the quality, and the shaded areas have little lines all over them.

I’ll try tiff

Muppetwrangler & joshvegas – Thank you. I’m still not finished with the full set of designs so I don’t want to waste any of your time

By the way the above instructions will set up a printer in the plot window you will need to play with settings in there like you would with a printer

You export in a WMF format which is vector based so shouldn’t loose any quality at all. Then if you need jpeg you can open the WPF in many other apps which can do the jpeg conversion and hopefully maintain your quality.

I’ve exported to WMF and it looks awful, all pixelated

Everything I do seem to lose quality

Managed to get an ok looking PDF for one of the logos

Jools

send it to me

I’ll it’ll only take 5 minutes and you can check the quality

Thanks Josh

I’ve sent an email

There is already a jpg and a png plotter in there.

Go to print, click on Name: the dropdownbox has a list of your printers but also PublishToWeb JPG.pc3 and PublishToWeb PNG.pc3 which are available at the bottom of the list as a printer.

You can customise colours, resolution etc in the printer properties.

I’ve tried the jpg ones, for some reason 2 plots seem to work fine, and 1 gets white lines over it, using exactly the same settings

you got mail