Ability to Publish PDF with "Print as Image" Option

[Josh Verran]

Due to the vectorial nature of fills etc, our PDFs end up lagging and freezing, often to the point where some are unusable. There are workarounds, but these usually involve substituting certain fills for plain or simple ones. That's often not an option when trying to visually annotate different building elements. My mindset is "we've got the resources let's use them". There's websites where you can flatten PDFs but hit and miss success.

Our current most efficient work around is; once we have published the PDF from Archicad, we then open the PDF in Adobe or Foxit and print to the "Microsoft Print to PDF" virtual printer, we then tick "Print as Image".

My wish is:
In the Publisher, under Document Options, there should be a "Print as Image" option like above, to avoid the below...

Perhaps in here:

[ethanbodnar]

Great call. We need this for sure. Seems very sensible. Experience the PDF lag often as well. 

[Lee Hankins]

We have experienced an issue for years on the Mac where printing PDF files generated by Archicad seem to be patchy and it seems to be linked to the fact that they are ‘layered’. This would most likely also solve that issue. 

[danielk]

We also have the same issue: PDF files are laggy when they are full of vectorial elements. That is just the nature of them.

What we usually do is we publish all the pages as a single merged PDF, then open that file in Adobe Acrobat, and use the "Export PDF" function, which can convert all of the pages into individual, high resolution JPEGs/PNGs.

Originally I wanted to just change the file format in the publisher from PDF to PNG, but when you do that there is no control over image quality in the publisher, and they always come out super-low-resolution...

So, to solve my issue, all I would need is a field in the image settings in the publisher, where I can enter the image resolution I want.

[Karel Landa]

This is a problem also with elevation where textures and shadows are combined.
On smaller project is is possible to print but if it is apartment complex where elevation in 1:100 is placed on A1 sheet paper, the printer is not able to print due "unmerged" layers.

[Vaclav Slovak]

YES, please make something with exported PDFs - i usually place simple project at one bigger (>A1) format and this bug makes it very discomfortable to use. Thans

[Benjamin Dani]

Hello, 

Thank you for your discussion about the topic!
This idea seems a useful addition to the software, so I entered a wish under WISH-13453.

Hopefully, we can see it implemented as soon as possible!

Best regards,

[PB]

Please add our support to this request.

AC can now produce visually pleasing elevations & sections with shadows and fills...but the PDF drawings issued to our clients are often too large and resource hungry for our clients to open them on 'normal' computer hardware. AC desperately needs an efficient PDF engine asap....

We usually have to open the pdfs in another programme (Preview on Mac) and save as JPEG for our clients to be able to open and view our output...far from ideal.

If we try to publish to JPEG in the AC publisher, the result is a reduced image size on a canvas with large margins - yet to work out why or if its a failure on AC part...

[MarcusLO]

I find it mind boggling how this isn't an option already when printing to pdf. It seems to be a standard option in Adobe PDF in general and in most programs I've used it for (Adobe programs, Autocad, SketchUp, Revit and Rhino). 

Please tell me there's some way to implent this? It's 2024 and we shouldn't have to use another program such as Photoshop/Acrobat to save as jpg or print to image. It can take 2-3 minutes just to open the pdf if it's filled with fills and other heavy graphics just to then save it again as an image, which adds further minutes to the whole process. It is also impossible to link archicad PDFs directly in InDesign/Photoshop/illustrator without it almost crashing due to amount of vectors and layers.

[Josh Verran]

Thanks for commenting Benjamin, I'm hopeful too.

Just an additional thought for if this does get developed.
Adding that option as I noted above would I think work really well.
Perhaps another workflow to consider would be drawing based.
Eg if the settings of each drawing allowed print as image yes/no.
That probably makes it to complicated, but I was just thinking of the scenario where perhaps you still need a plan to retain it's vectorial nature.
Could agruably still be achieved through publisher thou.