Elevations and Sections produce HUGE file-size PDFs

[alexliz]

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 ?!?.....

[alexliz]

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.

[alexliz]

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.

[Jaime-airc_digital]

Supposedly this long standing issue was resolved in Archicad update 27.2.1, but it seems that the problem persists. Please can someone at the technical team from Graphisoft clarify why this keeps being an issue? It is a huge problem that after publishing the users need to compress the PDF's just to be able to issue the drawings with the requirements of public authorities, which generally have a size file limit for uploaded documentation. It is a real problem that should be easily solvable out of the box without external manipulation and that is affecting all Archicad users.

[alexliz]

How interesting, @Jaime-airc_digital. I am guessing your screenshot is from this URL: https://graphisoft.com/downloads/archicad/updates/archicad-27-2-1

In this case, I would appreciate someone from Graphisoft clarifying what 'manageable file sizes' means in this sentence; or to confirm that the statement is false and that the PDF output is, in fact, completely unmanageable for all intents and purposes.

[Barry Kelly]

Maybe that defect fix is in reference to a different problem?

Maybe it is about placing an image file as a drawing in Archicad and then saving as a PDF.

The problem here seems to be when "Surface - Texture Fill, Shaded" is used in the elevation settings.

Also other texture fills and symbolic fills use in plan, elevation and section can affect PDF sizes.

The defect fix does not specify that it is this "Surface - Texture Fill, Shaded" problem that is fixed.

Barry.

[alexliz]

All the more need for clarification, then, on what "DEF-16875" was and where we stand on the issue of exporting elevations/sections with texture fills.

FWIW - I just loaded a 4.1MB photo onto an A1 layout in Archicad 27.0.0 (build 3001) and published to PDF retaining lossless where possible and un-checking the Limit Resolution To option. The resulting PDF was 998KB and opened in a millisecond in Preview. Based on this test I doubt there was an issue of this kind prior to 27.2.1.