Expert: Bill DeShawn - 10/28/2007

Question
I use Autocad Land Desktop 2005.  I regularly plot Autocad drawings to Adobe pdf files (using Acrobat 6.0) for use in electronic transmission.  I noticed today a huge difference between plotting rectangular viewports vs polygonal viewports.  Plotting exactly the same drawing with aerial photo images, and only changing from a rectangular to polygonal viewport changed the pdf file size from 356 KB to 11,106 KB!  I confirmed this repeatedly with several different plots.  I need polygonal viewports to display the drawings effectively, but the larger file size is not acceptable.  Can you tell me why this is happening, and if there is a solution?

Answer
One thing that I have done, is combine rectangular viewports to get a shape like I want.  Another is that I also have used wipeouts to hide things I don't want to see.  I color the wipeout with a color that plots at 0% screening (using color dependent plotting).  That keeps the wipeout from printing all black when printing the PDF file from Adobe Reader.  In my case, the color 255 works for that purpose.

I can't tell you WHY this is happening, but give these two ideas a shot.  I can "feel your pain" in this area.  I just used a polygonal viewport the day before yesterday.  I'm going to do it over with a series of rectangular viewports on Monday, because I don't want to plot to giant-sized PDF's like what happened to you.  Only Friday I had to print about 75 8.5x11 sheets that were giant-sized PDF files.  It took me 3 hours using 3 computers and two printers.  The sheets were multi-page scans and lacked character-recognition, so, they printed like a 100% raster file.  No text of fonts were recognized.  Only pictures of text.

I can appreciate that you don't want to pass files onto your clients that are this size and take so long to print.

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Bill DeShawn
http://my.sterling.net~bdeshawn