PDF's are too large

[smacdonald675082]

I am new to this AUGI, so I apologize if this is being posted in the wrong forum.

I work mostly with retail interiors, and rollout stores. So we do a lot of sets that are very similar but not the same. The problem I am running into is that our specification sheets are too large when we print to PDF. The dwg file are some where around 126kb each but when we print to PDF they become 8.5MB. This is understandably an issue.

I did read that if we make the font a truetype font and check that the PDF printer is converting it to text instead of graphics in the plotter configuration it would reduce the file size, which it does. However we typically publish all of the sheets together (35+). This becomes an issue because if I use the settings that work to reduce the file size on the specifications it makes all of the text on the other sheets PDF much bolder, and almost unreadable, than if I have the "True Type as graphics" option selected in the plotter configuration.

I had heard that if you print your PDF to PDF it reduces the file size, which it does 1MB in my experience. This is good but not great and the added step makes it a time suck and therefore not realistic for every day implementation.

I also read that if you use a third party PDF printer that the file size would be smaller. I tried Cute PDF writer, because I had some experience with it at another firm, but had no success with reducing the file size.

So my question is, does anyone know any other ways to reduce the size of a PDF of mostly text? Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Scott MacDonald, RA CSI CDT

[Wanderer]

Can you please clarify which software package (including service pack) and release you're using? That could have an impact on what tips you receive.

Ah, yes, my first suggestion would have been to try another pdf driver (I tend to use Acrobat myself, but, the built in pdf driver in most recent releases is okay).

[cadtag]

I'm going ti give you first, a non-technical answer, and then a technical answer.

Non-Technical; Specs are text-based documents that communicate verbiage, and drawings are graphic illustrations of design intent. It seems vastly more efficient to release a SPECS package (maintained in a real word processor -- which ACAD is NOT) and a DRAWING package as separate PDFS. Every architect I deal with uses that approach, and it works pretty well. And it's a hell of a lot easier to both maintain on your end, and read on the contractor/clients end.

Technical/process change: Instead of trying to publish files with such vastly different content types using identical settings, publish the drawing drawings to PDF with settings that work for the 34 drawing sheets. For the one or two spec sheets, publish/plot that with settings that are appropriate for text based cad documents. And spend the extra 90 seconds it takes to Insert the Spec PDFs into the master set.

[Coloradomrg]

Every architect I deal with uses that approach, and it works pretty well.

Over the past few years I've seen a desire for smaller firms to simply issue a set of drawings, no specification book. This means inserting our specifications in the drawings, which takes two or three sheets on most jobs that do it this way. I suppose it could be cheaper to issue 5-10 extra sheets than it is to print a spec book. The benefit to the contractor is that he simply has one set of documents to reference.

The size of your spec sheets is likely a result of how you insert the specifications. We keep our spec's, no matter how they will be issued, in word documents. When we first started this, I would make a PDF of the spec and insert that PDF into the cad file. This created fairly large files, that were generally unruly. We switched to cadig's autoword, which links the word document to the cad dwg. This makes my files tiny, because autocad just sees it as a bunch of text!