Printing Images to PDF in Plotmaker

[Anonymous]

I had a breakthrough today, and I wanted to share this since I have gotten lots of useful information from this site.

I was experiencing crashes and/or excessive file sizes, when trying to print scanned images to PDF. These images are hand drawn engineering details (8.5 X 11) that are scanned to .jpg, cleaned up in Photoshop and saved as a B&W .tif. Sizes of the files were no more than 100 k.

I placed these images in detail windows with unique names, and then imported them into Plotmaker.

What ended up working:
I turned off the "transparent toggle" in the figure tool in ArchiCAD and now the images print fast as well as having a small file size.
(I had set them to transparent so they looked cleaner in my drawing)

Hope this helps somebody else.
Neil

[Thomas Holm]

This is the same in AC12 (2156), using Publisher (not Plotmaker).

Pubished PDF files get significantly smaller (sometimes half or less) if you turn off transparency of placed .tif images.

AC is not an image editor, and thus needs to export all the components into the PDF file, placing the burden on the output unit (i. e. the printer). Files grow, and some printers choke.

So the advice remains: If possible, overlay, crop and edit bitmapped images in a photo editor (like Photoshop) before dragging them into Archicad.