placing image files create huge pdf file sizes

[Anonymous]

Hi

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong when pdf'ing? Image files and or photos placed using the 'place external (content) drawing' dropdown create huge files when pdf'd through the publisher.

So, in this instance I have placed a 328 KB jp2 into archicad (v12), saved the view, placed it on a layout (a4 size), added some annotations and then published to pdf, and it has turned into a 1.6MB file.

Same thing happens to photos and other image files.

Thank you

Moji

[Anonymous]

/subscribe

im having the same issue.

[Anonymous]

Moji

We had a similar issue here and found that if the transparency setting was on the PDF would blow out to huge sizes!

[Anonymous]

Kristian

My image had the transparency setting as off...I turned it on, PDF'd both - no difference. The image is a jp2 taken from the model, I don't know whether that makes a difference or not. I have however tried placing all sorts of image files with the same result.

So, I just did a test:
imported 311KB image into a word doc (MS Word 2008 v12.1.5)
saving the doc increased the file size to 1.2MB
PDF'ing the doc increased it to 1.7MB

So it's not just Archicad...and you're on a PC so it can't be a mac/pdf thing...???

Moji

[Anonymous]

This is a consequence of how PDFs handle raster images, and is not something that is easily avoided. Although when Adobe built the format they could have provided tighter compression the cost would have been that a lot of document publishing functionality would have been unusable for documents with rasters so they opted to make the file larger instead and keep the functionality. I assume that Microsoft made a similar design decision on how to handle rasters in their .doc format as well, likely for the same reasons.

[Anonymous]

Cleverbeans wrote:
This is a consequence of how PDFs handle raster images, and is not something that is easily avoided. Although when Adobe built the format they could have provided tighter compression the cost would have been that a lot of document publishing functionality would have been unusable for documents with rasters so they opted to make the file larger instead and keep the functionality. I assume that Microsoft made a similar design decision on how to handle rasters in their .doc format as well, likely for the same reasons.

You can still compress the heck out of a PDF if you have the pro version of Acrobat.

[Anonymous]

Moji

Just out of interest, have you tried the image as any other image format?
tiff, png, bmp... etc

[Anonymous]

it's not the compression
the pdf driver will resample the bitmap at the size of the print.
if you need to get a smaller size you have to edit the pdf file and resample the bitmap to a smaller size

[Anonymous]

Kristian wrote:
Just out of interest, have you tried the image as any other image format? tiff, png, bmp... etc

right, I've done all the above...
I saved the exact same shot as these following formats, placed on a pln and published to exact same specs, results as follows:

123KB .jpg increased to 131KB .pdf
307KB .jp2 increased to 1.7MB .pdf
1.3MB .pdf increased to 1.4MB .pdf
725KB .png increased to 1.3MB .pdf
2.7MB .tif decreased to 1.3MB .pdf

...granted some started large but the relative increase/decrease is what counts i assume.

zucoc wrote:
if you need to get a smaller size you have to edit the pdf file and resample the bitmap to a smaller size

It's the difference between .jpg and .jp2 that interests me; which in part relates to what Zucoc says about starting with a smaller files size (I believe) but it does not answer the question as to why the increase is so disproportionate...?? Probably .jp2 saves is such a way to allow super involved editing, which I don't require for this exercise, so I'll just save my images as .jpg for now.

Thank you all - it's really great to have this site to reach out to.

Moji