Good morning,
I was wondering if anyone has found any good tips for reducing the print time on ORD cross sections when using the roll plot style set up for multiple sections on a sheet as seen in FDM 905.
So far the only step to reduce the total time I could think of was to copy the DGNs all locally and edit the PSET paths to local so it doesn't have the typical network lag. But even doing that has only reduced the time to 5 minutes per sheet. We have 10 roll plot sheets. so that's roughly 50 minutes for a single PDF.
I know when printing PDFs with aerials, the quality factor can be lowered to decrease print time. Is there any similar trick for these dynamic sections?
Thank you!
Your thought of moving the files off the server and printing local is a good idea. Doing anything ORD over a server is going to be much slower than local. I would do that first.
Also, I have noticed that the nesting depth on all FDOT created sheets is 99. This has caused some issues for me in the past, so I have reduced the depth down to exactly what I need.
For normal plan sheets, I typically treat the Default model like the Motif file of old. So when I create the Drawing and Sheet Models, Drawing Model can have a nesting depth of 1 and Sheet Model can have a nesting depth of 2.
For Cross Sections, I typically create a Model Motif file where I reference in all my models and get everything looking the way it should. Then I reference that file (live nesting of 1) into my XS sheet file. Then when I create the Drawing and Sheet Models, Drawing Model can have a nesting depth of 2 and Sheet Model can have a nesting depth of 3.
You can make these changes to the individual models if you have already cut the XS. I usually like to go into the dgnlibs that FDOT provides and adjust those nesting depths so any new sheets I create will have the small nesting depths.
Zachary Billings, P.E.
Senior Roadway Engineer (Licensed in FL and MI)
CONSOR Engineers, LLC
System Info:
Windows 11 | Intel Core i7-13700k | Nvidia RTX 4090 FE | 32 GB of RAM | 2 TB Western Digital Black SN850x NVME
ORD Version 10.12.02.004 | FDOT Connect Version 10.12.01.00
YouTube Page for ORD: https://tinyurl.com/BillingsCADD
Zach, thank you for the suggestions. I will keep these in mind for future cross sections. This post was from a project that was moved through multiple ORD versions (10.08 through 10.10). I can't say I've had the time problem since then. I have run into far less issues keeping projects in their started version of ORD since.