Plotting with PDF Underlays

[sean_smwa]

I have a drawing where I've xref'd (8)8.5x11 PDF'd documents using the PDF underlay option.  The program runs fine, however something strange happens when I plot to PDF.  For some reason ploted PDF file size becomes quite large (in this example, the (8) original sheets is roughly .6MB before I bring them into autoCAD LT and when I plot to full size pdf the pdf becomes ~25MB).  Is this normal?  Is there a way to reduce the file size?  I should mention that the pdfs are almost completely text.  I've tried 'breaking' the PDF into individual JPGs and bringing in the images into the sheet, but the file size is still huge.  Is there a better way to bring in pdfs so that my ploted file size is more managable (I can deal with 1-3MB per sheet, but 25MB is, well, ridiculous).

[Charles_Shade]

Might be worth a search over here:

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Printing-and-Plotting/bd-p/30

Search this Forum too and post back if you find an answer.

[pendean]

There is no compression of raster images (or PDFs) in AutoCAD: there is no workaround or fix for end users.

[sean_smwa]

That's fine, but it seems like somehow AutoCAD is vastly increasing the file size.  Again, the original PDF that I imported was only .6 MB, but when I plotted from CAD, the document was 25MB

[pendean]

PDF has compression

JPG has compression

PNG has compression

Compression: make things much smaller than they truly are. Original file size is irrelevant, otherwise your DWG file would be 25MB and not your output file.