Revit Takes An Eternity to Make PDFs

[Anonymous]

I'm trying to make PDFs and each sheet takes an extremely long time to create. I have 45 sheets in this project. Is there any way I can speed this up?

[Anonymous]

What PDF printer are you using? I use Cute PDF its a free download & have not had any problems 

[chrisplyler]

Have you got views with crop regions edited to be non-rectangular? I've read that this can cause pdf creation nightmares.

[russellvee]

I've had no problems with cutepdf either. The most time consuming part of revit PDFs for me is that it always assembles multi-sheet pdfs in alphabetical order by sheet number. So I always get E sheets before M sheets before P sheets, which is the opposite of our company standard (and most other MEP firms I believe). So then I get to explode the PDFs into individual sheets, rename them with numeric designators, and then reassemble the multi-sheet pdf to send to clients. Its a really fun way to waste my time.

The computer programming side of me thinks it would be so very simple to provide a mechanism to order your multi-sheet pdf into the desired order, like the sheet set manager in Autocad. It would probably take an hour or two of programming for the Revit team, so maybe we can expect that feature in Revit 2045. Meanwhile I have spent hours trying to make a workaround by giving sheets an "numeric order" property and trying to get that to override the alphabetic order. I suppose nobody on the Revit team can imagine having sheet numbers that don't begin with the letter A.

[chrisplyler]

In the full version of Adobe Acrobat, and I imagine in some other PDF authoring/editing software packages like Bluebeam Review, one is able to reorder the pages within a multi-page pdf file. Just in case you didn't know.

[russellvee]

Hmmm that would be helpful. We have ancient Acrobat 9 licenses and I don't see any document options besides insert/extract/split/delete, so I'm guessing it is a newer feature. I've tried to push for bluebeam but we spent all our software budget on Revit subscriptions to make sure we get all the new useful update features like (...)

[chrisplyler]

I think I remember Acrobat 9 working. Just open the Pages pane/palette on the left side so you can see the thumbnails and drag them around.

[russellvee]

You're right! Thanks, that is a great tip. I'm pretty new to Acrobat and was looking for some sort of "reorder pages" option in the menus. That will definitely save some time, but it would still be nice if Revit simply gave you the option to print sheets in order other than alphabetical. I like to print my sheets to pdf often so I can quickly flip through them in black and white form.

Sorry to sidetrack from the op. Make sure you don't have the raster option selected in the print dialog. That makes it take longer and you end up with a larger file size.

[chrisplyler]

My standard practice is to print to pdf into separate files. Then I use Acrobat to comine them into a single, multi-page as well, and name it something with a "_FULL_SET" suffix. In this way I can quickly print a whole set if I want to, and I can still quickly just send out a couple of E sheets through email or whatever.

[chrisplyler]

Oh. I also have a sheet parameter I call "My_Sheet_Sort_Order" so that I can manually rearrange sheets in my project browser. Coincidentally, this is how they get printed also (not necessarily alphabetically).

[russellvee]

How do you have it set up? I tried using a numerical parameter for the "sheet order" which allows me to organize them how I want in the project browser, but when I go to print combined pdfs it always reverts to alphabetical order by sheet number:

I also can't get it to print the individual sheets to pdf without getting a popup prompting me for the saved name of each sheet. It works ok with a few sheets but when you have 20+ popups on screen it seems to get messed up and I can't just click ok every time, it eventually says the default file name is already in use. Is there a way to get it to not prompt for the file names?

[chrisplyler]

RE. Print order: Oops, you're right. I must have optimistically misremembered. I apologize. I guess if I had been right, I wouldn't have had to figure out how to change the page order with Acrobat, huh? I do think I'm beginning to suffer age-related stupidity.

RE: File names: Yes, you can stop the Save As dialog from popping up for every file. In the Print dialog box, after you select Adobe PDF as your printer, click on the Properties... button. In the Adobe PDF Document Properties dialog box, look for the setting called Adobe PDF Output Folder. Change the setting from Prompt for Adobe PDF File Name by designating a destination folder instead.

[jkarben]

Bluebeam has a Revit add-in with their offerings that allows you to preselect your sheet order. No post operation reordering required. It saves the setting for subsequent sets. Works pretty nice.

[drewbranson10]

If you have views that have non-rectangular crop regions it will cause your PDF sheets to take a very long time to print. I know of some people who were able to use masking regions instead of cropping the view to prevent the slow load times but I havent has much success with doing that personally.

[tyler_heinrich7]

Still bonkers to me how its acceptable to have a program take an hour to print a set of lines in an industry where millions of dollars are being thrown around. 

[tyler_heinrich7]

Weird how other render engines out RIGHT NOW that are FREE have no problem rendering millions of polygons IN REAL TIME. And we have to use a dinosaur fossil for multimillion dollar projects. 

[ToanDN]

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@tyler_heinrich7 wrote:

Still bonkers to me how its acceptable to have a program take an hour to print a set of lines in an industry where millions of dollars are being thrown around. 

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Something is wrong with the views then.  Nothing takes more than a few ten seconds here.

[RobDraw]

This is a user help forum. Complaints belong elsewhere. As you can see, there are people here that can help with your issues, That is if you want help. If not, the complaint department is down the hall and to the left, Try Product Feedback or the IDEAS forum.

[tyler_heinrich7]

I have had problems from Revit 2018 to Revit 2023 from my time starting work in the industry. I suppose my companies printing process is severely flawed. When looking at the forums the closest solution is usually someone finding that it randomly works on a certain computer for a nondisclosed reason. And then there's no more info. FYI We use CutePDF and it's normal operation to expect half hour print times (on about 60 different computers)

[iainsavage]

Slow printing is, in my experience, due to shaded views being printed in raster.

I've never had a problem with line based views such as hidden line, wireframe etc.

Consistent colours setting instead of shaded will also avoid using raster printing.