topic Re: Clipped PDF making drawing extreemly slow in Civil 3D Forum

Clipped PDF making drawing extreemly slow

yara_khoury — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 17:02:37 GMT

Hi All,
I have attached about 10 pdf to a drawing, and it is working great. Once i started clipping the PDF into a small areas, the drawing became very slow. How can i fix that ?

Re: Clipped PDF making drawing extreemly slow

tcorey — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 13:37:24 GMT

Polygonal clipping is slower than rectangular.

Re: Clipped PDF making drawing extreemly slow

ianjchap — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 13:50:25 GMT

Hi @yara_khoury,

Happy New Year.

If I start to struggle with speed, my first thought goes to seperating out the information.
Try saving the PDF's to individual DWG's, clipping and Xrefing back into a combined DWG.

Alternatively you could try the PDF import tool and convert the information to DWG format. Results can vary depending on the quality of the PDF and the information in it.

Re: Clipped PDF making drawing extreemly slow

jroot — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 14:17:23 GMT

When I have performance problems in a DWG with attachments I usually blame PDFs. If I'm the one doing the attaching I will always convert the PDF to an image first and seem to have no problems, even with trimming them.

Re: Clipped PDF making drawing extreemly slow

lim.wendy — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 07:44:45 GMT

Hi Yara,

Thank you for submitting your question in our discussion forums. As @ianjchap mentioned, isolating the problem is often a good first step in troubleshooting performance issues. Here are a few things you can try:

Identify the problem PDF: Check which clipped PDF is causing the slowness.
Check your clipping shape: If you’re using a custom shape to clip, it might be adding complexity. Polygonal clipping is known to be slower than rectangular clipping, so I recommend using a rectangular crop region and see if that improves performance.
Reduce the PDF size: If the PDF file is large, try recreating the PDF at a smaller file size.

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