Exporting to PDF

[CameronWallace]

I have an 8.5 x 11 layout that I want to export to pdf. Some of the feature classes have a lot of complex polygon features.

I've been playing around with the export options, but I can't seem to get the resulting pdf size under 1.2 GB... which takes several minutes to create. This is of course totally impractical...

Seems like it might be due to the size/complexity of the feature classes... Any way around it?

[IanMurray]

What DPI are you exporting at?  Are you exporting it to a layered PDF and if so are you including feature attributes?

Can you post a screenshot of the map so we can see how vector dense it is?

I don't think I've seen a pdf over 100 MB and that was about 3' x 4' with several fairly dense fishnet layers on it and lots of labelling.

Edit: See also this thread https://community.esri.com/message/443003#443003?sr=search&searchId=dd157923-bb38-4bde-b8ba-e6b64a58...

[CameronWallace]

250 DPI, layered or not, still about the same. It is fairly vector dense ~ 93000 complex polygons (yes I know it's impractical to see any detail... I'm just trying to avoid having to dissolve everything just to export).

Unfortunately I can't post a pic as it's confidential...

Layout is letter 8.5" x 11"...

Have also tried image compression, reducing image quality, etc.

[DanPatterson_Retired]

In cases like that, I have on occasion used a screen grab of the layout view...the difference in quality between going through massive hoops to get an out versus an acceptable result was negligable  I use SnagIt and they have an evaluation copy www.techsmith.com and their editing and output capabilities are unrivaled... worth a hour of your time perhaps

[CameronWallace]

I can screenshot just fine... And an export to *.jpg works ok too. It's the lack of ArcGIS Pro's ability to deal with huge vector data-set's when exporting to *.pdf that's bugging me. I've long since worked around the issue... but it's a work-around.

[DanPatterson_Retired]

have you had any luck exporting to another format keeping losses low then using other software to get it out to pdf?  I have used tiffs, png (etc)... I don't know what they are using to produce pdfs

[JoshuaBixby]

I had success using third-party PDF printer drivers (Adobe, PrimoPDF, etc...).  I recently had a 8 1/2 x 11 map layout with a moderately dense polygon layer.  Regardless of the settings in ArcGIS Pro, I couldn't get the PDF size down below 25 MB, and there were oddities with the PDF like patches of missing or extremely slow drawing polygons.  Using a third-party PDF printer driver, I got a rather nice looking PDF for 1.75 MB.

I suspect the issue has to do with rasterizing vector layers, or not rasterizing them.  When using a third-party PDF printer driver, it seems Pro is forgoing vectors altogether and rasterizing everything, hence why my PDF is only slightly larger than a PNG export of the same map.  When doing a PDF export straight out of ArcGIS Pro, it must be trying to hang onto most of the vector data, which would make sense for a really large map layout but not so much for an 8 1/2 x 11 layout.  Something similar happens with SVGs with small map layouts because I get huge exports of those as well when a dense map layer is involved.

Honestly, I think it is just poor code that isn't taking the map layout into consideration when determining how dense the vector output should be when exporting straight to PDFs.  In ArcGIS Desktop, the issue doesn't seem to be as noticeable.