Flattening PDF

[Karol Lozinski]

Hi,

I have a problem with PDF's exported from ArchiCAD, and it's not the first time either. Is there a way of exporting/ saving PDF files from ArchiCAD with flattened layers?

I've seen dozens of similar posts on forum, and each and every time I feel like there was some misunderstanding in comments. I don't need lighter files, as in having less megabytes, I don't care about the weight, I don't have issues with combining PDF's, none of those things. 

Issue is that with complexity, number of layers within the file grows. It doesn't have to do anything with page size - I've had the same problems with small drawings and with huge ones. But when there are too many layers, other apps start to choke. Clients have problems with opening them, printers can't print. Not because the file is too heavy, but because there are too many layers. Layers, that I absolutely don't need within PDF! There are other file formats that serve that role. But when I zoom in or out on PDF and I can see the drawing rendering in front of my eyes there's something wrong. 

And I know, that within PDF option while saving the file is a checkbox for "Exporting layers to PDF" but unchecking it doesn't do much.

I've seen people suggesting to get rid of some fills, or make them less dense or anything, but really let's be honest - Do we really need to compromise our drawing and informations because PDF can't be save as it should be? Thats not a solution. 

Using online tools or Printing to file as an image either does nothing or rasterizes the whole picture. Sure, when it's rasterized it definietly is a singular "layer" but the quality drop is huge! Also, I'm required to send vector files, so also it's not a solution.

I've attached an example file to the post. Any help will be appreciated.

Operating system used: Windows 1123H2

[Karol Lozinski]

I was talking to a friend, who has Mac and it turns out that she didn't see the "loading" at all in some PDF browser. But everyting became clear for her, when I told her to upload attached file to this site. There you can clearly see the PDF "loading".

https://smallpdf.com/flatten-pdf

[Karol Lozinski]

I think I'm close to some kind of sollution. Maybe it'll help others with similar issues.

For now what I've learnt is that's incredibly hard if not impossible to "flatten the layer", though I have no idea how the same drawing will go seamlessly into printer straight from ArchiCAD and will be printed with easy, while printing from PDF will rather result with crash than success.

But what I've found is that there are some fills/ hatches that printers and other apps don't necessarly like. Symbols like the one that I've used for grass, or "triangles" or "carpet" fills seem to kill printer. Changing them to for example simple fills like Brick does wonders. Suddenly everything starts to work. Which is ironic, because for grass I've used fill that in default is called Grass (at least in my language version). 

So not even necessarly the density of the fill might be the probleme. But the type of fill. In my opinion this shouldn't work like that. It's not normal, that we have some fills that are practicly unusable.

I'll keep testing.

[Vaclav Slovak]

Please make this a WISH - we need to print 3D documents with fills normally, not 15 minut for one page!

[loymistre]

I would like to know if this issue has been resolved and how.

[mthd]

I had a problem with exporting a file to DWG. Too many layers so I was shown how to do line consolidation before exporting to DWG. I wonder if this approach might help before printing in pdf ?