Publish DWG to PDF file size is very large

[jcavanagh]

I'm running Windows 7 Professional and using AutoCad 2017.1.1  

Today I needed to send out a PDF of a set of plans for permit submittal.  So as usual I use the Publish command and I'm using the office standard Page Setup that is using the DWG to PDF.pc3 file that is located on the server that the whole office uses.  I made a PDF set of these drawings 2 weeks ago and the PDF size was 16mb, which is the expected size.  For some reason today the pdf is 96mb which is 6 times larger than the previous PDF that I made 2 weeks ago.  There are no images or PDF's that are attached to this set of drawings.  It's all 2D cad work with no thick of heavy hatch patterns.  To test, I opened a totally separate project and did a Publish DWG to PDF.  The file size for this PDF was also 6 times larger than the previous PDF that was made.  To further test, I went to another workstation to publish a dwg to pdf.  The PDF file the was created by this workstation was normal size, 16 mb.  So there must be a setting on my workstation that is incorrectly set.  I tried creating a new DWG to PDF.pc3 using PLOTTERMANAGER and I got the same result.  Any help would be muchly appreciated.

[nahas786]

In your page setup go to pdf options change vector quality and when you publish select the option that plotter named in the page setup. hope this will solve the issue. in my case i was selecting publish to pdf and precision to manufacturing.

and I was getting around 25 mb files. but when i changed the above mentioned settings the file size reduced to 4mb.

[liana.kriebel]

Rather than create a new thread, I wanted to report that I'm in AutoCAD 2024 LT, Windows 10.  I had PDFs coming out about 4x larger than those published by my coworker, who is on 2024 LT, Windows 11.  Aside from the different OS, I had Publish to Background checked in my settings and he did not.

I unchecked Publish to Background, et voila, my PDFs were back to a normal size.

(To see if the different OS had anything to do with it, I had him check Publish to Background.  The PDF that came out was about 4x bigger, so the OS doesn't seem to be important.)

While I would prefer to publish in the background, I can live with it if it means my PDFs can fit in an email.

[TuRK_182]

Could be various reasons however, one thing to look at is the vector and raster quality.
Out of the box, PDF vector and raster quality is set very high and this is not needed.
Human eye cannot see past 300 dpi.
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My suggestion is to look at the printer name, I use DWG to PDF and set my qualities as shown here.
As previously mentioned, there could be different reasons and another issue are CAD files with inserted PDF files as notes or standard schematics. AutoCAD plots with PDF attached makes the plotted file (PDF) large as well but nothing can be done to fix that. Notes inserted as MTEXT (like specifications) can also become an issue.
One file by itself may not be an issue but combined with other things the published file can become large.
I run publish tool with PUBLISH DIALOGUE BOX so I can control what AutoCAD will print.
Hope this is what you are looking for.