Flatten 3-D Surfaces to 2-D

[ninjaskllz]

Hello. I work with a lot of PDF drawings that are printed from AutoCAD. In AutoCAD, there might be several 3-D surfaces that are included within each drawing (i.e., each page of the PDF).

The problem is that the surfaces are very "heavy" in PDF, and it takes a really long time to print the PDF files to our printer because the PDF software has to "flatten" everything. And it doesn't save any of that effort. So say I print one of these files and say it takes an extra 20 seconds to flatten the page. If I decide that actually I want to print one more copy, it would take 20 extra seconds again to go through that flattening process.

Therefore, I am trying to figure out a way to save a flattened version of that file so that printing these drawings doesn't take several minutes. Can anyone help?

Thank you in advance.

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hello ninjaskllz,

Unfortunately there is no way for us to manage this. Printers (both virtual and physical) handle the data that is sent to them from the CAD application itself, so if you are looking to "pre-cache" a flattened version if content from an CAD file, you would want to present that as a feature request to AutoCAD directly.

Beyond that, unless you are making changes between prints, which would invalidate any sort of "cached" version of the print, there is no point in caching to begin with. If you wish to duplicate the output PDF file, simply Copy the PDF file and rename the newly pasted version, or use "save as" to create a new version of the file to work with.

Kind regards,

[ninjaskllz]

Thanks for the reply. A couple of clarifying thoughts.

Unfortunately there is no way for us to manage this. Printers (both virtual and physical) handle the data that is sent to them from the CAD application itself, so if you are looking to "pre-cache" a flattened version if content from an CAD file, you would want to present that as a feature request to AutoCAD directly.

Believe me, I've tried . I have researched this fairly extensively, and there is no good way to do this from the AutoCAD side right now. So, given that I have not had success with achieving the intended result during the AutoCAD-to-PDF printing process, I am trying to find a solution whereby I could save a flattened or rasterized version of the PDF which would speed of the PDF-to-physical-printer printing process.

Beyond that, unless you are making changes between prints, which would invalidate any sort of "cached" version of the print, there is no point in caching to begin with. If you wish to duplicate the output PDF file, simply Copy the PDF file and rename the newly pasted version, or use "save as" to create a new version of the file to work with.

No, I am not making changes between prints. My goal is to speed up the PDF-to-physical-printer printing process. Currently, this process takes a very long time because the files are redundantly flattened/rasterized each time any user wants to print something. So I am trying to figure out if there is a way to save all that information in the file itself so that it does not need to be flattened/rasterized each time.

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hello ninjaskllz,

If you are only looking to improve the physical print time, you could print a copy of the document as an image to our PDF-Xchange Standard printer. This would save a pure images version of the document therefore removing the extraneous information left over by AutoCAD. Then printing that pure image copy of the document should theoretically not take as long. Although depending on page size, images may actually be heavier and thus slower than a normal printing process.

Do note that printing PDF to PDF is generally not recommended as it can damage the document and result in lost content in the output files. I am only suggesting this today as "print to images" would remove that content anyway.

Kind regards,