Elevations and Sections produce HUGE file-size PDFs

[alexliz23]

It's all in the Subject line above guys. I get elevation PDFs to the tune of 10MB, even 60+MB. Very difficult to open and share. Impossible to send to printer. Am I missing something, or were these never meant to be printed and shared?

I have got them with the "Uncut Fill" option set to "Surface - Texture Fill, Shaded" and all external walls have the "Stonework - 02" surface.

Many thanks.

[runxel]

Long standing issue that Archicad produces overly large PDFs. Even more so when textures and heavy fills are involved.

It boils down to the inability to reduce the size of the texture adequately. You can try to shrink it down with Acrobat or one of the many online services. In some cases it might help. Other than that? Refrain from using texture based S/E's, I guess. 😕

But I agree that there must be a built-in solution. Seems like nobody thinks through the whole process – it's nice that we have those cool textures in S&Es, but we need to publish them, too ?!?.....

[alexliz23]

Thanks Lucas. What a pity, it's a good effect and it's (essentially) wasted.

I am now looking at reducing the PDF file size with Adobe and macOS Terminal commands. The result, of course, is nowhere near the original - there's considerable trade-off.

[Skyhook]

Agree that Graphisoft really need to focus on solving this for all of its users. Surface textures in elevations and sections (but still not plans or 3d docs 😥) look amazing on screen in Archicad, however, as identified by the original poster above the resultant PDF’s are practically unusable due to being too big to print and being incredibly slow to navigate as pdf’s. We have a mixed Mac & PC environment (latest macOS and Window 11 Pro) and it is problematic on both platforms. This has to be solveable, as Mac’s and PC’s can print extremely complex images of much higher resolution without breaking a sweat using other software. Surface textures were heralded as a major new feature of AC25 with at least one article on Graphisoft’s  website being published showcasing the interior design advantages afforded. Hopefully this is being worked on currently and will be delivered as a much needed hotfix as it is too good of a feature to leave in an unusable/unfinished state. Please GS 🤞.

[Aaron Bourgoin]

Unfortunately most of the PDF reading/editing tools (except for Acrobat) lack the ability to streamline vector graphics. We looked at this while trying to find a replacement for Acrobat. In the end, we have an Acrobat station dedicated fro the task of cleaning and optimizing files for issuance.

[alexliz23]

Thanks for the comments, Skyhook & Aaron.

In the end I got greatly reduced files by converting the PDFs to PNGs.

The textures in my Elevations and Sections are of lesser quality with the conversion, but not terrible.