PDF File Size management

Hi

Right in the middle of a planning submission I exported all my drawings to separate pdf files.  however each file is 33 Mb so will not email or upload to the online planning portal.

I have generated a single file that contains all 40 of my drawings and what appears to be happening is that even though I have selected only one of the drawings at the right scale in the preview pane, the pdf takes the entire drawing data as every one of the 40 drawings is the same size!

I assumed that by selecting only a part of the drawing and exporting it would only export that section of the file as a pdf but it does not.

I have found three solutions, none of which is satisfactory.

1.    File Management
If I split my forty drawings into 40 separate files I can generate smaller pdf files (>1Mb) but the drawing management becomes very complex.  I can actually manage about 10 drawings which generates pdf files circa 4Mb which is just about acceptable.  It remains an unsatisfactory solution.  The admin of the drawings as changes are made becomes a nightmare!

2.    Delete and Recover
If I delete all but the drawing I am interested in and then export to pdf file this gives small files.  I can then recover the original full file of 40 drawings and move to the next one repeating 39 times to generate a set of files of acceptable size.  I used copies of the original to make sure I do not lose everything by accident.  Slow and complex way to generate the files.

3.    Print Layer
I added a layer called Print Layer, selected the drawing I wanted to export and via the attributes tool moved the entire selected single drawing into the layer leaving line colour, width and type as "unchanged".  I then hid all layers except the Print Layer and this also generated a small file.  However it also lost most of the element attributes in the drawing as everything defaulted to the attributes of the new layer so line thicknesses and colours were lost (strangely though, the line type was retained).  Again, complex and not really satisfactory.

It is too late for me but I am raising the issue in the hope a solution for future users can be found.  I am stuck with my large pdf files that I will put on a stick and hand deliver the the planners.  I cannot use any of my solutions as the drawing has also lost all of my photo images imported to a separate layer and I need the photos to show on the drawings.  I will raise this in a separate thread.

Ho hummm.  Back to the drawing board......

Geoff

Indeed, if you export to pdf only a part of a drawing/file always the whole data is included. The part not shown just is hidden, not displayed. A weakness of pdf export. You can verify this by opening such a pdf in Inkscape. The drawing will at first appear as a single entity when clicked on it / selected. Do Object - Ungrouping (or however it is called in the English version, I only have the german one at hand in the moment) several times, and - tata- the whole content will become visible suddenly.

If you use an external Print to pdf tool like PDF-Creator, or CUPS - PDF in Linux, it is different. Files are smaller then, but not all invisible entities will be removed. Lines crossing over the border can not be cut apart.