PDF Drawings SLOW to load in Adobe Acrobat

[Anonymous]

My client is having difficulty doing measurement in Adobe Acrobat. Drawing sheets are published as PDF from the AC Publisher. Each drawing sheet is between 400KB and 3.5MB large. The building sections are the larger file size drawings and they will take 5-15 minutes to load if you just let Acrobat sit there and work. If you actively switch applications and come back to Acrobat, it seems to update the stalled redraw of the sheet in large chances. Doing this several times can actually get the full sheet to show. If you don't do anything, it makes you think Acrobat has frozen.

The drawings open fine in Preview and Safari, but my client wishes to use the measuring tools for distance and area from within Acrobat.

Is there any known issues / workarounds to et things working?
Is there an alternative OSX PDF Viewer with measuring tools for such work? Or possibly a DWF viewer could work?

Thanks in advance.

[Anonymous]

having the same issue here and would love to find a fast rendering application.

[Karl Ottenstein]

Cary wrote:
having the same issue here and would love to find a fast rendering application.

Confused about the second part - finding a fast rendering application. Are you talking about rendering/displaying PDF? If rendering images, then please post a separate question in the "Presentation - Rendering and Multimedia" forum:
http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewforum.php?f=3
although reading there should give you your answer.

For PDF delay, it is interesting that both you and Daniel are seeing this on separate platforms (he on Mac, you on Windows).

There isn't a product called Adobe Acrobat any longer (for some years) - there is Adobe Reader, and Adobe Acrobat Professional. To clarify: do you each see this in Adobe Reader (the free viewer product)?

Since Danaiel had no problem with Apple Preview, the issue seems to be Adobe's and not Graphisoft's. In the past, slow-opening PDFs were related to lots of hatch/fill patterns - e.g., complex shingles, lots of little dots for stucco, etc. Haven't heard of this being in issue in many years though. Perhaps a screenshot of a PDF that is slow for you would help folks give suggestions.

[Anonymous]

Carl, perhaps I fired off a bit fast and I could be barking up the wrong tree. I have a serious love hate thing with Adobe in general and PDF's in particular.

My documents seem to get quite filled with fills so a pox on my house. With the advent of trace I have come around to doing much of my work creating "overlay" views thus allowing me to construct a layout page using multiple overlays as opposed to creating a layout specific layer set. This has the added benefit of allowing for different pen colors /weights to amply the info of a given layout. However when it comes time to process on my HP designjet T790ps or open in Acrobat Pro X in Windows7 or reader on my iMac or my iPad Air the more fill rich plans with multiple overlays can take silly ass long times to render. The thumbnail render rebuild times in Acrobat bound sets make the bound sets awkward to use. I have not yet tried BimX docs, perhaps I will find that helpful. I have a house project with over 140 30"x 48" sheets so it will be interesting to see how that works. So perhaps my reliance on fills and a trace overlay strategy while great on my side of things may prove not practical means for communicating with owners, contractors, codes, and vendors. Of course all the simply stuff I get from my engineers renders in a flash.

If acrobat would just build the thumbnails once in the bound set and be done with it that would go a long ways towards taking care of things on the windows side. For the iPad Air I simply need an app that has a faster rendering engine than Adobe reader. I have just started looking into this and there are a number of apps claiming to be faster. Hope somebody is telling the truth.

[Karl Ottenstein]

I'm not sure I follow Cary... but in case you are using fills in your overlays to mask stuff that is on a drawing below... do note that ALL of that information is included in the PDF (unless something has been improved)... so if you see a slow generation of the PDF, you may see a lot of linework/fills get drawn only to be covered up by an opaque fill, etc.

A clean drawing from layer-controled views won't have that issue (if that is relevant)... nor will an image file (tiff/jpeg) for the layout (but of course who wants a jaggy, nonscalable image file vs a beautiful, scalable vector PDF?)...

Hope that someone else has some suggestions for you...

[Anonymous]

An after-market PDF writer may solve the problem. I use Amuni PDF Converter, which is setup as a printer in my application software. It writes nice, quick-loading PDF's from ANY software application. I use it for any printed media from any program.

There's lots of free PDF writing software gizmos out there. Just load on your machine, setup as a regular printer, then 'print to file'. One or another will probably provide the results you need.

On AC12, I noticed the same thing... PDF's written using AC's native publisher were incredibly 'heavy'. Using the Amuni software gave me back the nice, quick-loading PDF's of my previous versions.

[NCornia]

I suggest that you troubleshoot the scale and complexity of the fills. I have seen cases where if a fill is set to a really small scale it will take ages for Adobe Reader to build the PDF. The smaller the scale the more polygons are generated in a given space and the complexity increases exponentially. http://www.archicadwiki.com/PdfFileSizeAndFillChoice

[Mario Sacco]

Another thing that make the pdf very slowly in layout is when I change the border of a design from fit frame to re-sized frame (rectangular or polygonal).
Try it. With complex design it is ten time faster if you don't re-sized border. In a polygonal border more point you add more it become worst.
Obviously it's not a good think. I often use polygonal border.

Try to open the pdf in Illustrator. You'll find a great amount of useless invisible polygon to the border of the design. They are all "clipping mask".

On mobile you will see a very huge different in speed.

Please GS solve the problem.

[Anonymous]

HI there
For me ,i usually load or draw the PDF files using a third party PDF processing tool.They supports to load or process the PDF files diretly and effectively.There are many fine tool for PDF files.And most of them offer a free trial for new users.You can just have a try at first.You said that you want to get an alternative OSX PDF Viewer with measuring tools for such work.That exactly what i want to get actually.Because my present PDF viewer can not do that direcly.Thanks for any suggestions.

[Csaba Kezer]

mariosmic wrote:
Another thing that make the pdf very slowly in layout is when I change the border of a design from fit frame to re-sized frame (rectangular or polygonal).
Try it. With complex design it is ten time faster if you don't re-sized border. In a polygonal border more point you add more it become worst.
Obviously it's not a good think. I often use polygonal border.

Try to open the pdf in Illustrator. You'll find a great amount of useless invisible polygon to the border of the design. They are all "clipping mask".

On mobile you will see a very huge different in speed.

Please GS solve the problem.

Hey Mario,

This is a long standing issue for us where there seems to be no better solution than what we currently have.

Probably in your case it wouldn't make a difference, but at many occasions the result would be different if you use only one clipping polygon rather than as many as we do. Lines and fills would be trimmed differently which could cause a difference with how the elements would look at the frame of the drawing.

The speed issue is not only present because of the many clipping polygons. You also need to have many drawing elements which are not exported as a pattern. For example the Fiber insulation - when placed with the 2D object - has its each line drawn separately and no pattern is defined. If you export it as a Fill, it will be much faster as we can define a pattern in that case.

Cheers,
Csaba