PDF Bloat

[Aaron Bourgoin]

Yesterday I ran an Acrobat Pro 'optimize' on a 6 page pdf published from ARCHICAD 23. The published file was 28Mb. After the optimization it was 4Mb. Ran another this morning. Start was 44Mb, optimized to 7Mb. Booth these files have building elevations which I'm sure are full of redundant lines, etc. The PDF engine is set to not include layers, and the other settings do not apply anything complex to the file.

While I'm happy to have a tool to do the clean-up, it does beg the question as to why at least some of the optimization can't be taking place inside AC's PDF engine.

Is the engine licensed by GS from a third party? Does it use an engine bundled in the OS?

[runxel]

PDF's a hell of a format.
Graphisoft relies on PDFTron's PDFNet. (Funnily enough, Autodesk and Bentley do as well).

Compression comes at a cost, tho.
Anecdotal I once experienced weird errors and bad print jobs with PDF. Tried everything. In the end I disabled the compression of lines and text (PDF was generated in InDesign, if I remember correctly). Then everything worked smoothly.

[Aaron Bourgoin]

@runxel. Running Mac here, I've discovered that any form of Acrobat will print vector PDFs better than Apple's own Preview. I spent a day troubleshooting a PDF published from AC only to discover that it printed fine from Acrobat.

[Aaron Bourgoin]

As a follow up to all this frustration, I discovered this morning that Acrobat Pro's Optimization settings need to be used carefully. While it shrank my 44Mb file down to 7, it also displaced lines and fills making the elevations I published useless.

Back to square 1.

[Brad Elliott]

Aaron,
I'm no production expert but I have found creating a custom Quartz filter worked well for me. If you open the drawing in Preview and go to export the Quartz filter becomes available. The default Reduce File Size is way too destructive but you can fine tune to your preferences. Just Google reduce file size quartz filter.

[Aaron Bourgoin]

wow. will check these out. Thanks Brad.

[runxel]

Aaron wrote:
As a follow up to all this frustration, I discovered this morning that Acrobat Pro's Optimization settings need to be used carefully. While it shrank my 44Mb file down to 7, it also displaced lines and fills making the elevations I published useless.

Ha, yeah, thats also kind of the issue I was talking about.....