PDF file is huge, is this normal?

[Anonymous]

I just published a set of preliminary drawings (about 12 floorplans, 12 sections and 5 elevations) and the pdf file is about 80 MB, which is a huge file, is this normal?

[Thomas Holm]

That depends on the content. Especially if you have a lot of images, that is bit-mapped tiff or jpg files, or PDFs containing them, the file size will grow. Tiffs with transparency turned on is another possible culprit.

If you can't change the content, the remedy is to break the publishing up in smaller parts. Easy in the Publisher.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Thomas!

[vfrontiers]

I can also tell you that if you kept your Amyuni PDF Driver from AC10, and "printed" to pdf, they'd be a lot smaller...

I am not sure Amyuni works in Vista (I'm guessing "No").

[Thomas Holm]

vfrontiers wrote:
I can also tell you that if you kept your Amyuni PDF Driver from AC10, and "printed" to pdf, they'd be a lot smaller...

I'm not sure about that - I still think this is content-dependant.

Archicads PDFs are extremely compact and efficient when they only contain vector info. And that goes for large projects too. This is something to remember, if a project is growing, it will be much better managable if you minimize the use of bit-maps, pasted pictures, logos, scanned maps and other images. If possible, use vector and solid fills instead of images.

And if you can't avoid them, remember that Archicad is no bit-map editor. Therefore, try to reduce the images' resolution to the minimum needed for the intended printing. If possible, do all editing of them, overlays, crops etc in a bit-map image editor like Photoshop, to final appearance, before pasting into Archicad. And check that Archicad doesn't have to crop them at print time.

The above will optimize Archicad's performance.