Huge PDFs

[lxskllr]

Got a couple new jobs today, and got the blueprints as pdfs as well as full size paper copies. I prefer digital plans cause I can print them out half size and they take up less room. I can also keep them on my phone, and check stuff in the field. Well, one set was a 50mb 20 sheet set, and the other was 190mb 33 sheet set. Aside from being terrible looking prints, they're waaaaaay too big, and hammer my computer just trying to open them. It literally took > an hour to process and print the big set. I'll never be able to use these on my phone.

So... What the hell did they do wrong? I'm more curious than anything. Any way to blow them apart and see what's inside? Any solution would have to be libre software, and work on gnu/linux. Would inkscape give any reporting functionality, or maybe see where the issue is? I think the problem is they were put together by amateurs, but it would be nice to see where things went bad.

 

[deadlyapp]

Are they direct exports from a cad software? I've run into that before where there were literally hundreds of layers that got embedded in the PDF for visibility but it made the file so burdensome you couldn't use it. Usually simply opening them in reader or acrobat and saving them as reduced size helped a lot.

 

[lxskllr]

Are they direct exports from a cad software? I've run into that before where there were literally hundreds of layers that got embedded in the PDF for visibility but it made the file so burdensome you couldn't use it. Usually simply opening them in reader or acrobat and saving them as reduced size helped a lot.

Not sure how they were generated, but I would expect they came directly from cad. The way some of them were edited, it looks like crap was added on top of crap. Some parts are blurry, like they have several stacked layers that don't quite line up, then out of nowhere, there'll be a note with a nice crisp font that looks the way the whole plan should look. I'll play with it when I get a bit of time. Fixing it isn't essential. Just interesting, and may help keep me from making the same mistake, or more likely, preventing the mistakes from the cad guys in our office, though I don't think we make crappy plans like these.