Huge drawing file size

[ServaCleanCAD]

Hi all,

 

I've opened a drawing emailed to me, which is a 13Mb file. When opened, there's hardly any detail visible. However, a CTRL+A selects 115,051 objects! When I select everything visible using a window, I only get 2,612 objects. The cursor is hesitating when dragging across the drawing in modelspace, like it's snapping to objects I can't see. All layers are turned on, all colours are set to be visible. I selected the visible objects, pasted them into a new drawing, and saved, which reduced the file size to 216K!! Is there a way to find what all these invisible objects are? Thank you for your help

[ReMark]

Why? Would you sleep better nights knowing that they were "no-see-ums"? You solved your problem so move on. Maybe they were invisible blocks.

[ServaCleanCAD]

The reason for the question is that it's a 13Mb drawing reducing to 216K. Something must be there, and I want to know what it is! It might be some critical information! Plus the fact that emailing a 13Mb drawing is sometimes tricky...

[ServaCleanCAD]

Here's the answer I found on another site. The extra objects in my drawing were text objects with only spaces. Thousands of them...

"Make sure your large drawing contains no superfluous hatches (especially exploded hatches) or unused (unreferenced) blocks. Thaw and switch on all layers, zoom to full drawing. Do not forget the paperspace (layouts). Use PURGE to purge unused blocks and symbol table definitions (for nested blocks, several PURGE cycles may be needed, the commandline -PURGE version has more options). The AUDIT command can make more table entries purgeable.

 

There can be also invisible objects in your drawing - you have to make them visible first. The DBLIST command can help to identify these objects. They can be:

1. texts or attributes containing only "spaces"
   
2. faces with all edges set to invisible (some add-on applications make them)
   
3. blocks containing only invisible attributes
   
4. points with low visibility
   

Problem No.1 can be solved by setting the QTEXTMODE variable to 1; problem No.2 by setting the SPLFRAME variable; and problem No.3 by the ATTDISP variable. For the problem No.4, set the PDMODE variable to 3 and PDSIZE to 0. By temporary setting of these variables (and a regen) you can display the originally invisible entities. After modifications set the variables to their original values.

 

Make sure your blocks defined in the drawing contain really only the required symbols and not e.g. the whole drawing. This applies also for the dim-arrow blocks like _DotSmall or _Open. Your drawing can also contain other non-graphical entities (custom objects, dictionaries, ...) coming from add-on applications (and the 'registered applications' themselves) or e.g. from the 'layer filters' function (frequent problem) or from excessive annotation scale lists. You can purge these using the corresponding functions (e.g. DeleteFilters, DBXremSL). "

[ReMark]

I never had a drawing ballooning to that size without good reason. Ex. - complex 3D drawing of a 3-story building with chemical manufacturing equipment included. I regularly (religiously) purge my drawings after every drawing session.

 

That said, thank you for providing such detailed information. It should be useful to anyone else who has to deal with invisible objects. Glad to hear you got your problem solved and thanks for updating us.

[SLW210]

CADTutor has many threads about supersize drawings with few or no objects....just check Similar Threads at bottom of page.

 

You should be more concerned with why someone would email you a drawing that size without Purging and reducing it down.

[BlackBox]

I regularly (religiously) purge my drawings after every drawing session.

 

Same here... it's part of our startup, executed at drawing open/save, via acaddoc.lsp, and reactors respectively.

[Jack_O'neill]

The only time I've experienced that was when someone used a vertical product to create the "whatzit", then tried to convert it to something plain old autocad could work on. You said someone emailed this to you...do you know what product they use?