Construction Documents / PDFs from AutoCAD/Revvit

[Stephen Ellwood]

I work for a company that has used Nitro for 5+ years. We have owned several different versions of Nitro over the years. With each version of Nitro, it appears that the processing of large construction documents is slower and slower and more often than not resulting in crashes. The machines are high powered so this should not be the issue. When running Adobe Reader to open the file, there are no issues. When using Nitro Pro, it is extremely slow and crashes frequently. This is frustrating as Nitro has been our go to for many years but its becoming impossible to use it.  It appears to have something to do with processing layers of the drawings as bits and pieces appear at a time. 

 

The Construction Documents are given to us in PDF format, generated from AutoCAD or Revvit. If anyone has anyway to fix this issue, please let me know. We're at the point where we may need to switch from Nitro entirely as we cannot even open plans, let alone edit them. 

 

I believe my Nitro version is 12.12.1.522. I know my coworker has Nitro 13 and has the same issues. 

[Allain Umailin]

Hello @steve@collierconstruction.com,

Thank you for reaching out to us through our Community Forums!

Kindly note that AutoCAD/Revit files (to check, go to File > Document Properties) contain rendered content/drawings and printing using the Nitro PDF Creator requires Nitro Pro to basically re-render and re-draw the content to a PDF. This can cause the Nitro software to crash, especially if the AutoCAD/Revit  file has much content or several layers of drawings.

To bring in an AutoCAD/Revit  file into Nitro Pro:

a. Open the file in AutoCAD/ArcGIS  > File > Export to an image format. (i.e. .jpg or .png format)
b. Open Nitro Pro > click on the Home tab > PDF > From File > Add Files > select the image file. This will convert the image to a PDF format. 

This process works over the direct print using the Nitro PDF Creator, since it does not require Nitro Pro to render the content in the AutoCAD/Revit  file.

Thank you for choosing Nitro and I hope this helps.

Edited February 22, 2022 by Allain Umailin

[Stephen Ellwood]

Allain,

 

Thank you for the response. I believe there was some confusion. These files have been provided to us as PDF files. I am having trouble simply opening the files that have been provided as PDF. Nitro is extremely slow, or crashes during opening. 

 

Thank you,

Stephen 

[David Ettershank]

HI,

I am also having this problem with loading PDFs with multiple layers.  Both pages and thumbnails are agonising slow to load and/or refresh.

When projects arise, I work with multiple other firms so to have plans converted to a graphics format is never going to happen and frankly defeats the purpose of having PDF at all.

I hauled out my old version of Acrobat Pro X and the same files were loading fine and in somewhere between 1/3rd and 1/2 the time for pages and a fraction of the time for thumbnails.

My sense is that this has got worse over the last 6 months (the last time I was looking at a lot of large PDF plan files). 

I am using Nitro Pro v 13.35.3.685.  My PC is an i7 with 16 GB of ram running windows 10 pro 21H2 -  OS build 19044.1586

Would really appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks

David

[David Ettershank]

I note that release 13.53.3.1073  notes refers to:
"Complex Document Performance

This release contains an enhancement around Nitro Pro stability when working with complex documents rich in bookmarks, layers and grouped objects."

Can I access a 64 bit version of that release and if so how?

Thanks

David

[Deanna Whan]

I am also experiencing this issue, crashing, extremely slow scrolling and regenerating.  I have to use my free Foxit software to handle these "complex documents" without issue.  I also require the 64 bit version, has this been released?  Frustrating since I paid for Nitro and it can't handle these documents but my free PDF program does.