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John Livingston's

The Nuclear Electrical Engineer

An educational resource for electrical engineers in the nuclear power industry

Here you can find design tips on technical skills like cable and breaker sizing, short-circuit evaluations and more, PLUS deep-dive analysis of nuclear-specific topics like design basis, Tech Specs, UFSARs, and safety-related SSCs — built from primary source documents.

Tip of the Week · Feature

Creating new page sizes with Adobe Acrobat

Sometimes you might need to convert a CAD drawing into a more common document format, such as PDF. . . .

You can use a free program like Autodesk Design Review to open CAD files in the .dwf format. Then, you can print that file to PDF.

But what if the original CAD drawing page size is different from any of your PDF printer presets, like ‘Letter’ or ‘Tabloid’? What if the CAD file’s original size is something like 30 inches by 42 inches (called ‘Arch E1’ or ‘Arch 5’)?

You’ll want to make sure the PDF page size is the same as the original because formatting errors can crop up if you print to a smaller size—errors like line weights becoming too thick and making parts of the drawing unreadable.

This looks unprofessional.

The solution is to create a custom page size. You give it a custom name and dimensions. To see how this is done using Adobe programs, click the following link:

Create and use a custom page size

CutePDF offer free PDF creation tools as an alternative to Adobe’s. They also provide instructions for creating custom page sizes:

http://www.cutepdf.com/Support/faq.asp