Export Quality Dialog
3D PDF files have a Quality page in the Export Options dialog.
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Set the grid surface quality before exporting the current view in the 3D window to a 3D PDF file format. Use the 'Export Coordinates' feature to improve the appearance of large XY coordinate exports to VRML but sacrifices precise XY accuracy. |
Grid Quality
Set the quality by selecting a percentage on the Grid Quality setting scale between 1% and 100%. This setting determines the number of rows and columns sampled from the worksheet. The minimum number of rows and columns is 16 x 16.
Grid Coloring
The “Use textured coloring for surfaces with no texture layers” option forces Surfer to use texture-colored rendering instead of vertex-colored rendering when exporting 3D surface layers to a 3D PDF. Natively, 3D surface layers are vertex-colored, which causes them to drop out or render incorrectly due to limitations in the 3D PDF format. All other grid-based layers are texture-colored and export successfully. Checking this box overrides the default vertex coloring for those surface layers, converting them to a texture-wrapped format during the export process so that they render cleanly in the final 3D PDF.
Export Coordinates
Exporting large XY coordinates, such as UTM, to 3D formats (e.g., PDF, VRML) may produce a blocky appearance in some viewers. This occurs because Surfer uses 64-bit precision in its exports, while certain external viewers (e.g., Adobe PDF, SAP 3D Visual Enterprise) restrict rendering to 32-bit precision, which can reduce quality. The “Export Coordinates” feature addresses this issue by improving the appearance of VRML exports; however, it does sacrifice real-world XY accuracy.