PDF choking down my system

[Ski_Me]

Whenever I insert a pdf of a drawing it chokes my system. It takes a long time to reposition the drawing if I want to look at parts of the pdf. I insert into model space and then frame it with a viewport in paper space.

[PotGuy]

Is this a regular occurrence?

 

Does this happen to only this file? (PDF /or DWG?)

 

What are your comp. specs?

[nestly]

PDF's are notorious for slowing down drawings. Try using a free PDF --> DWG converter and either insert the converted PDF as a block, or xref it.

[Ski_Me]

I haven't tried creating a block out of a pdf but that might be the thing to do. It's a Dell Precision T3400 don't know the specs since I didn't look them up yet might later.

[nestly]

I don't think you can turn a PDF into a block what I meant was to convert the PDF to a dwg then insert the dwg as a block or xref

[Ski_Me]

Is this a regular occurrence?

 

Does this happen to only this file? (PDF /or DWG?)

 

What are your comp. specs?

Just pdf drawings. I can insert pdfs that are just pages of text without any performance hit but once I insert something that's a drawing then things get bogged down. I tried creating a block out of a pdf but it just does the same thing once I insert the block. doesn't look like there's anything I can do. I'm stuck with this computer until it explodes or something.

[Jim H]

If you can save the pdf to a .png or .jpg and insert that, it will help.

Of course, you will lose the ability to snap to geometry.

[ReMark]

Why is it being inserted in model space?

 

The Dell Precision T3400 can hold between 2-8GB of RAM. How much is installed in yours?

 

The graphics card is entry level as it only had 256MB of DDR2 SDRAM. Not really what I would call a workstation class graphics card.

[Ski_Me]

Not sure how much RAM it has but I know the graphics card is 1 level above a turd rating. It's a company rig built on the recommended specs from Autodesk.

[mikekmx]

Not sure how much RAM it has but I know the graphics card is 1 level above a turd rating. It's a company rig built on the recommended specs from Autodesk.

 

does your 'puter not display how much RAM it has as it boots up? pretty much the first screen..

 

FYI...my PC is a 10yr old mid-level to budget machine i built for gaming mainly. it runs autocad flawlessly except sometimes plotting to PDF can take a while if 'realistic' visual mode is switched on.

my autocad started to crash about a year ago, and the crashes became quite common, but lowering the RAM's clock speed a little has cured it.

[ReMark]

Not sure how much RAM it has but I know the graphics card is 1 level above a turd rating. It's a company rig built on the recommended specs from Autodesk.

What version of Windows are you running? Would it be WinXP by any chance? If so two ways to find out how much RAM is installed in your computer are demonstrated here...

 

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_much_ram_memory_windows_pc.html

 

One other option re: PDFs and a slow system response. You can try to reduce the size of the file itself. Do you have Adobe Acrobat Pro? If not then you can use this free service (Max upload size 5MB)...

 

http://convert.neevia.com/pdfcompress/

 

Another option would be to download and install Ghostscript along with Irfanview. Use the Save As option to choose a suitable compression level. Try using the "high quality" setting which should yield the best results.

Edited August 6, 2013 by ReMark

[Bill Tillman]

I have an i7 Quad Core with 20 GB of RAM running Windows 7 x64. I build two of these machines from scratch with a NVidia Quadro Pro FX 380 graphics card, to do a quicker job of preparing renderings with AutoCAD. Which they do. Took some files I was working on a dual core x64 machine that took over 2 hours to render a model and reduced it to less than 20 minutes on these machines. But if I bring in a PDF underlay, the panning and zooming slows to a crawl even on these powerful machines.

[Chilidawg]

I convert PDFs to TIFF files, then down sample the TIFF. At 8.5 x 11 final drawing output, the down sampled TIIF is usually acceptable.

 

1 TIFF per drawing ~

 

Too large, and it won't plot.

[Ski_Me]

I guess it's how autocad handles the xref to PDFs. Seems like when you zoom or pan it has to go back to the file location and redraw the image. The bigger the image the longer it takes to redraw it.

[ReMark]

PDFs are the bane of our existence. A pox on them.

 

What's the typical file size of one of your PDFs? Have you tried using any other file type to achieve the same result?

[Mike_Taylor]

If the PDF files are generated from a CAD file from another compay I would specifically request that they plot/publish as a DWF rather than a PDF. when inserting as an underlay the performance hit you take when PDF's is not there at all. Not only that but when snapping to geometry it is much more accurate and you have to option of snapping to more geometry than PDF files. I have been requesting this for a while it really does help.

 

If the DWF file is unattainable try inserting the PDF into a new DWF file by dragging it into the palette that shows your sheets in the DWF and resave. The performance difference is marginal when zoomed out, gets increasingly better as you zoom into the inserted drawing more to the point where I don't notice a difference at all.

[nestly]

PDFs are the bane of our existence. A pox on them.

 

Yeah, PDF's are fine for output, but avoid using them to bring information into AutoCAD if at all possible.