@ArchyVR Very impressive visual results, I like what you’ve done. Unfortunately, a lot of municipalities require drawings in vector format upon permit submittal. And as I was trained as a graphic designer, seeing full-size prints from raster drawings makes my eyes bleed — not to mention needlessly increases file sizes.
What does this mean in practice? Do they want DWG files, or models to full scale? Can’t you no longer submit drawings on paper? If they want vector PDFs, what is the use? You cannot measure things directly from a PDF, it is too inaccurate. In our parts all the relevant dimensions must be shown with dimension lines.
That’s interesting what @izaacpost says about local authorities wanting drawings in vector format.
I have no idea how it works – here in the UK the planners can use Adobe or some other PDF software the set the scale of a PDF and use the software tools to measure.
The public can also do this on the local authorities’ public planning portals.
Is it the case that this measuring ability only works accurately with vector?
As far as I know it’s not mandatory here in the UK.
Measuring from vector PDFs can probably snap to vector lines so you get an illusion of more accuracy than when pointing to pixels in a raster image, but even a vector PDF is still just a printout, and not as accurate as the originating CAD or BIM geometry. You can test this by exporting a PDF from CAD and bringing it back - the dimensions are not quite the same.
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I agree with you that I would prefer being able to export vector graphics, unfortunately for now, for larger projects, Layout is too slow in vector and hyrbid, but fortunately lighting fast with Raster. It’s true that the PDF file exports become much larger, but I’m willing to pay that price for speed. Note the key when exporting raster is to NOT use jpg compression! That gives you clean outputs without the compression noise. I end up issuing two drawing sets, the direct LO PDF output for print and another reduced set using Adobe Acrobat for screen/web viewing.
I converted one of my projects from Vector/Raster to all Raster viewports that was taking about 10 minutes to update all SU viewports and reduced the update time to about 30 seconds. This makes a huge difference in keeping your momentum and workflow going.
Also, the PDF export I posted was a test example at 11x17. I usually export at 24x36 which increases the fidelity. See below.
house-24x36.pdf (1.9 MB)
Also, working in the California Bay area, I have never been asked for vector PDFs. I’m curious what jurisdictions are requiring this and for what reason? One advantage of Raster is that you make it more difficult for people to reverse engineer your PDFs back to CAD and make unauthorized changes to your drawings. (An office I used to work at had this happen to them)
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@Anssi & @PaulMcAlenan & @ArchyVR
Burien Washington is one of them that requires vector-formatted PDFs, but I think it is a standard provision of the interagency service ‘mybuildingpermit.com’ which covers many agencies in the greater Seattle area except for Seattle itself. As that is where I live, I only have local knowledge. I have a faint memory of the City of Bellingham (another nearby town) requiring DWGs on a commercial project.
There are many advantages of vector over raster format, but I do not know precisely why some agencies have chosen to prohibit or discourage raster-formatted drawings. Next time I am talking to a plans reviewer I’ll ask.
Advantages are:
- Small file sizes
- Faster and cleaner printing
- PDFs often will save metadata from the CAD program which can include additional information and attributes assigned to objects and layers. Most significantly, they can include what scale it was drawn at incase the legend on the page was incorrect.
- You can quickly calculate square footage from a vector PDF.
- PDFs can also be accurate to measure against if using the right software. Obviously certain software doesn’t handle PDFs as well as other software, but I’ve been able to accurately scale off vector PDFs to the 16th of an inch. I’m sure I could have gone further had I needed to. I do often go back and forth between Affinity Designer (similar to Adobe Illustrator) which natively reads and writes PDFs, Sketchup, and AutoCAD. I’ve even converted PDFs to DWGs and gotten results just as accurate as Sketchup’s native DWG export dialogue. I’ve had great results with Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Acrobat, and Affinity Designer. I know a project manager who has supplied me with a ton of markups and measurements using BlueBeam which, it’s my understanding, is reading the vector data in PDFs to supply measurements for construction management process and cost estimating.
@PaulMcAlenan : the level of accuracy I describe is only possible with vector because each line is saved as an object with an extremely precise assigned length. You can click on each line segment and the computer will display the exact length that it was drawn at. You can also enable wireframe mode to view superfine details that would be lost a raster document due to the fixed line thickness.
@ArchyVR what is really strange is that in almost all graphic design programs, raster drawings take far more processing power and consume far more time to generate/render than vector graphics. For instance, editing a very complex adobe illustrator project can be done on super old computers, but doing the same in Photoshop would grind the machine to a halt. Similarly with motion graphics, editing video or applying raster effects takes far more of a computer’s resources than animating vector geometry. Illustrator (and Affinity Designer) can edit enormous .dwg files as if it were childs play.