Opening drawings exported from CAD to PDF

[MasonJY]

Hi, I'm having so many problems opening PDFs generated from AutoCAD. I'm a wireless engineer so I go onsite and survey wireless installations.

I often make floorplans to work with. I export these to PDF and then open them on Acrobat Pro to export to an image/crop etc. These floorplans are 8-10Mb in size and Acrobat seems to handle them so poorly. Constant freezing and locking up. My system is an 19-12900K, 64GB DDR5, and an RTX A2000 so I'm near certain my system is not the issue.

Can anyone suggest a better software for managing large PDFs or a tweak I can do to Acrobat?

TIA,

Mason.

[BarlaeDC]

Hi,

Would you be able to share a document that shows the issue, maybe there is something we can help with but without a document to work with it would just be guess work?

[MasonJY]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

Unfortunately, I can't share files from the clients I work with.

The PDFs are taken from CAD. The CAD drawings are floors from large warehouses. They have lots of detail such as conveyor locations, mezzanines, etc. I know this doesn't help much but it should give you an insight into the types of PDFs that are being made. As I say each one is around 10Mb.

I'll try to find something I can share in the meantime.

[Creamer Training]

I had an AutoCAD drawing that brought Acrobat down to a crawl. At first, I thought Acrobat froze, but it took many minutes to change pages. After some investigation, it turns out that massive amounts of outlined text was causing the problem. In my case, it was some pages of "legalize" text that had to accompany the drawing. I deleted those pages and Acrobat was back to its old self. (There was still some text on the drawing itself, but not enough to give Acrobat a problem.)

As a test, see if your fonts are being converted to outline when exporting to PDF. If so, turn it off and see what happens.

As an aside, using the 64-bit version did not help.

[Luke Jennings3]

Here is a (slightly) related CAD discussion, where I suggest a few ways to simplify a complex CAD pdf, including optimizing; saving as PDF/X-1a; saving content as an image, and flattening and simplifying objects in Illustrator. Perhaps one of them will help you with your issue:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat-discussions/convert-to-grayscale-crashing-incomplete-and-unre...

[Mitchell251740655skr]

I have the same issue with larger floor plans, and I've had some success by unchecking Preferences / Accessibility / Enable assistive technology support