One of our customers has started scanning their old roll-size drawings (36" x 10 feet or more) using a newfangled scanner and saving them as PDF files. Some of them are up to 125 meg (!) but still open and view fairly quickly with Adobe Reader, and print fairly quickly to either letter-size printers or roll-size plotters. I've personally done it both on my computer and on the customer's computer. I am using AutoCAD 2000 combined with CADoverlay 2000i to work with some of these drawings in Tiff format. I then use AutoCAD and Acrobat 7.0 (using the Acrobat distiller as a printer) to save the drawings to PDF format. The resulting files are maybe 8 meg. So far so good -- if 125 meg is no problem, 8 meg should be fine. Problem: my files take forever to open and display in Acrobat, and simply will not print to any printer. Same result if I open the file on the customer's computer. Complete fiasco. What gives? Do I have some sort of setting wrong? Or are there different varieties of PDF's? Is there a possibility of a conflict between Acrobat 7.0, which I just installed, and our Computer Associates E-Trust Antivirus software? Do I strip off Acrobat, somehow turn off the CA program, and try again? As always, any help would be appreciated. -- Steve
Steve, I believe that there are compression settings within Acrobat when creating the pdf file. This may help with file size. Another thing that might have an effect is the TIFF file. These generally do not offer much in the way of file compression and could be part of the problem. Do these documents need to maintain resolution at full size, for reproduction purposes, or simply as reference? EPS image files may be a solution instead of the TIFF option. Scott
The size if the original TIFF image may be the problem. I have had problems before trying to print images more than 100 megs. If they are TIFF images, they may take a long time to open because Adobe uncompresses the image.....very memory intensive. Mike
