PDF Printers - Adobe vs Bluebeam, PDFCreator, Nitro, Foxit, Bio, PDFXchange, PDF995 and doPDF

[delgado.raymond705060]

Is anybody using a PDF printer that can hold its own to Adobe in terms of file size and quality for raster printing? We feature lots of 'Hidden Line with Shadows' views in our sets. I've tried both free and paid, in my tests even the incredible Bluebeam prints PDF's that are several times larger than Adobe. I've tried Bluebeam, Nitro, Foxit, BioPDF, PDF-Xchange, PDF995 and doPDF just to name a few. It was a long day that I'd rather not do again.

This is sure to be pretty subjective, but maybe somebody has found another PDF virtual printer that goes high enough quality to stand up to Adobe and still has a small file size.

Adobe's 'standard quality' PDF's seem to have just the right balance when plotting raster 'Hidden Line with Shadows' from Revit. Unfortunately for legal reasons I can't share any of the actual sets I'm plotting. Just posting this in the hopes that maybe somebody has found a great PDF printer, or maybe I've been mangling the settings on the others. Here are some file sizes for a 38 page PDF with 10 pages of 'Hidden Line with Shadows' views and 28 pages of vector drawing views, all on E1 size paper:

Adobe (Standard Quality): 16,980
Nitro: 50,801
doPDF: 84,713 (had to go super high settings here too, the other settings made ugly drawings)
BioPDF: 49,089
PDF995: 62,633
FOXIT: 31,934
PDFCREATOR: 102,889 (I had to go uncompressed jpgs to get comparable quality to Adobe standard here, that was a bummer)

[a_meteni]

You’ve certainly picked the major tools for PDF printing:).We’re using DoPDF and it works OK.
Just a thought, did you get the same quality when exporting to DWF? You can then print those DWF files to PDF format to get better raster quality (But I’m not sure about the file size issue).