Collaboration with other software
About model and data exchange with 3rd party solutions: Revit, Solibri, dRofus, Bluebeam, structural analysis solutions, and IFC, BCF and DXF/DWG-based exchange, etc.

Email ArchiCAD's pdf's

Anonymous
Not applicable
How does ArchiCAD make a pdf ? and why can some be so large ? 13.4 MB...? so much so that I can not send more than 2 pages at a time by email ...and I do have DSL !.

I found that I was trying to mail 24 pages that added up to 30 MB's...but I could not even send 4 pages at that rate...even compressing would not do enough to help much...what's up ?
Thanks
2 REPLIES 2
Thomas Holm
Booster
I'm not sure it's Archicad's fault.

Yesterday I published a 16-page PDF from Archicad (Merge pages on).
1 floorplan (lines and solid fills*), 2 sections (lines and hatched fills), 4 elevations (internal engine color shaded renderings/default settings), 5 pages of perspectives (live internal engine 3D color shaded views), and 3 pages of text (four fonts). Large part of the model is an average-complexity terrain mesh, with contours and lots of variously shaded polygons.

In average, the pages were about 80 kB each.1.2 MB in total.

I tried "Shrink filesize" in Adobe Acrobat. It grew slightly bigger! (That means Acrobat thinks Archicad's pdf is a small as it gets).
As email, the file grew to 1.6 MB (this is due to the normal text encoding).

I would guess it's your content that makes it big. Avoid bit-maps, jpegs and complex hatches. Use interna engine shading when possible, insead of open gl or rendered jpgs.

*Of course I modeled. I'm describing the content as it looks in the PDF!
AC4.1-AC26SWE; MacOS13.5.1; MP5,1+MBP16,1
Anonymous
Not applicable
I was having large PDF file size problems in V10. But they seem to be fixed in V11.

Have you got any imported images in your files (renders, logos etc...)? Or graphics in your title block? If these are not optimised properly they might create bigger PDFs.