Carlson Software Forum

I'm having difficulty plotting to PDF in Civil 2013 with IntelliCAD. No matter what size sheet I set the size to, it only plots a small portion of the drawing within the view I have selected. Does anyone have any suggestions on what to try? The PDF driver is the one that came with Adobe Acrobat XI Pro.

I would recommend you try out Autodesk TrueView. It is available free from AutoDesk website, just pick your operating system. It is a full DWG viewer and packs the full set of AutoCAD print drivers, etc. It is basically like printing from real AutoCAD.

Once installed, copy your plot table files to TrueView's Plotters Folder.

Choose AutoDesk's DWG to PDF as the "Printer" and customize your various print sizes as Plotter Configs. You may have to choose the "Full Bleed" Paper Sizes. AutoDesk's DWG to PDF yields superior quality PDFs to Acrobat's Drivers in my opinion. By default, this also writes layer info to the PDF. This may be undesirable in some cases and can be turned off in the printer properties.

There is a downside: Trueview does not save the plotter settings to the layouts. What I do for this is set as much as I can from InteliCAD, such as the print area, etc. True View will relate to that. It is a bit of extra work, but worth it for the results.

I also use (on my laptop), "PDF ReDirect2", also free, which has turned out to be a surprisingly decent PDF-er. It installs as a Printer and shows up as such when you plot from IntelliCAD.

If you are running Carlson NEVER, NEVER , NEVER load AutoCAD TrueView!! It will take over your entire set up and will NOT do anything to add a solution to a plotting problem. I would look more at your settings under your pdf software, Adobe or whatever.
Be sure that your sheet size you select will fit the scale you are plotting at. You cannot take a 10 acre topo and try to plot it on an 11x17 at 1"=10' and expect for it to all fit on that sheet. Double check your settings.