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PDF size.....Why oh Why can you not sort it out


monkey

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i know this has been said many many times, but myself and our graphics team seem to spend the majority of our working lives reducing PDFs exported by VW. i have never come across a bit of software that makes PDFs with reasonably low settings soooooo bloody big!!!!

we are all becoming tired of it, and are now moving to other pieces of software to do what we would have originally done in VW, purely because of the PDF issue. our output may not look as good as it would have done in VW, but its a hell of a lot quicker!

NNA, you must be able to sort this out.......surely.......it cant be rocket science!!!

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Is there a report somewhere showing the components of our big VWX created pdf files? Does all the layer, class, record, 3d location info somehow get packed into these pdfs, but in a way that is useless to other software, or even when imported back into VWX? If this is the case, then the oft wished "flattening" function would be helpful. If something else is growing the file size, then we need another approach.

-B

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Yes I also find the PDF's are most of the time extremely large. This then creates a situation with my clients where they cannot see the file then ask for a print which then winds up being delivered by me across town which adds up to allot of wasted time and money, where a small PDF can be emailed, noted by the client and sent back in minuets and I can still have time to, oh watch a youtube video or get some other work done.

Sorry for the ramble!

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I have found a work around to the big PDF size. I found printing to a PDF in vectorworks somehow does not give me good enough quality, so I always export an image file (i usually use png) then I print that to a PDF. It does suck that I have to take 2 extra steps to get the final document vectorworks should be able to produce, but it does work.

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I'm not entirely sure that its the vector elements that increase the file size. I often receive vector based PDFs generated by Autocad of entire stadiums that weigh in at a mere 500KB. There's something about the bitmaps that Vectorworks generates and how it crops them that is definitely part of the problem. When trying to optimize a Vectorworks PDF in Acrobat you often get the error message "The PDF document contained some masked images that were not down sampled." This leads me to believe that most bitmaps generated by Vectorworks sample a much larger area of the drawing/viewport than they need to and are masked off using clipping paths.

Kevin

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i think kevin is right here.... there is no reason why the pdf's should be so big just because they are vector based. we use a lot of OS mapping in our drawings, and funnily enough, the pdf always seems to be roughly about the same size as the mapping image....... so even though the viewport only shows a small part of the mapping, it looks like VW is exporting the whole thing!

and before you all say......reduce the original image.....we do, its just we use 35km radius from our sites quite a lot so there is a limit to how low we can go

sucks like hell

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