Who can tell me why PDF files exported from CAD / revit are slow

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
September 6, 2024
1 reply
3114 views

In Illustrator, I work with PDFs that were exported from CAD/Revit architectural programs and they are painfully slow. Is there a way to connect with someone with Adobe or a third party who can examine a sample file and tell me WHY these are so bad?

I've tried all my tricks and researched, but I don't know what else to try. If someone could specifically say what's going on, I could try to fix it in my files. Or I could tell the architects what to do differently.

Performance

Monika Gause

Community Expert

Can you open Window > Document info and tell us how many paths and anchor points are in the files?

What are your hardware specifications?

T

travisb10426269Author

Inspiring

Here's a sample file's info. I'm using a Mac Studio (M2 Max) with 64 BG of RAM.

And what's the biggest impact in file performance- is number of paths worse than number of masks? Open paths worse than closed paths?

Monika Gause

Community Expert

We use plans as a base layer for wayfinding documentation. I know the files are complex - CAD makes everything worse by making fills as masks and strokes as separate objects. But this Studio machine is just as slow as the 5-year-old iMac it replaced, so it seems like Illustrator is the problem. Affinity Designer is 10x faster, but doesn't work with the rest of our workflow.

Is it necessary to make the fills in the CAD? Or could you also make them in Illustrator? So whatever makes the file less heavy, would be a good thing, no?

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