DWF vs DWG vs PDF File Size comparisons

[sbrown]

3d dwf of 191mb highly detailed model(3 story, 180,000sf tuscan style) = 24mb (not bad and highly effective) approx 10min to export.
3d dwg of 191mb ""= 47mb exported quicker than the dwf.
2d Elevation sheet 36x48 (4 views)- shaded with edges

pdf = 9.4mb
dwf=5.8 mb
dwg=26 mb(larger than the 3d dwf and its just a sheet with 4 elevations)


Heres where its interesting

2d Individual Elevation

pdf = 366 kb
dwf = 1.2mb
dwg = 4.4mb

I guess the dwf has more info in it, not sure why it would so much larger when in sheet format the dwf does better. I wonder if dwf handles the large sheet size better where pdf treats it all graphically?

Some other things I learned trying to print/export this huge model.

Disconnect your machine from the network. I have no idea what happens but printing to pdf and exporting to dwf and dwg took over 1/2 hour for the sheet(and crashed 3 times) when connected to our network but only took less than 5 minutes when disconnected.

[GuyR]

What PDF writer are you using? Wat version of DWF?

[sbrown]

Adobe PDF
Dwf writer 3

[aaronrumple]

You need to make sure you are comparing apples to apples, which with the default settings you are not.

PDF is set for publication - this means the default DPI is if I recall correctly 1200 DPI.

DWF is set to 300 DPI by default.

I've found that the file size of each is about the same when you set the DPI to the same value.

With Acrobat you can customize the settings to optimize the file size and quality. I have my defaults set to 400 DPI and TrueType fonts as outline for best compatibility.

[sbrown]

Good point, I used the default pdf which as you say is 1200, however its smaller than the dwf on the single elevations but larger on the whole sheet. I can't imagine a 300 dpi pdf is going to look as good as the default dwf, but I'll check it out. I also have to check the high quality pdf to avoid boxes of the drawing being moved out of the proper location.

[LRaiz]

It depends. 300 dpi elevation may look very good provided your view contained no raster images.

I would expect file sizes to depend significantly on the nature of printed pages. If views contain contain only vector data (lines, line patterns and text) then I would not expect dpi resolution to affect file sizes considerably. On the other hand if views contain raster images (shading, rendering, dense patterns that Refit turned into solid fills, and solid fills created by users) then raising dpi may increase file size considerably.

PDF and DWF writers use different algorithms for compressing raster images. So either one or another may behave better for your particular view. At least in theory I can imagine that printer driver developers may tune raster image compresion algorithms for use in a particular kind of application (e.g. architectural rendering) but I doubt that they actually have done it.

Regarding PDF winning on stand alone elevations but loosing on elevation sheet - you may want to examine your title block and see if it has raster images.

[GuyR]

From here (http://www.aecmag.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=74)


AutoCAD (due roughly at the usual time around March) should include support for DGN and Adobe PDF.

Weird..... Are we going to see PDF support (rightly) return to Revit in V9?

Guy

[Scott D Davis]

Supposedly, the next version of Windows has PDF capabilities built in. Print any application to PDF. Not sure if this will include multi-sheet support or not.

[GuyR]

Supposedly, the next version of Windows has PDF capabilities built in

Are you sure you don't mean MS.Office? After Massachusetts said they were going to only support open standards (pdf and odf) MS turned around and said they'd support pdf printing direct from Office. ie OpenOffice pdf support. Now of course MS is going to produce Open XML. Which depending on who you believe, won't be that open if they support binary schema extensions. And so pdf support for MS.Office is up in the air again....

BTW, Openoffice pdf printing is pretty cool. Every heading style becomes a bookmark. Great for printing specs.And damn fast.

Guy