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dwg file size

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civeng80

Structural
Joined
Dec 21, 2007
Messages
745
Location
AU
Just wondering what a reasonable size would be for a dwg file.
Ive got one at the moment about 20Mb, not causing me a problem but Im wondering is it too big for its brichess ?
 
What sort of drawing? Building? 3-D model? Mechanical with GD&T?

I receive drawings from architects all the time that are 15- to 30 MB, and they have hundreds of layers with unintelligible names. I have to lay out electrical, controls, and some parts of air distribution. My computers are very fast and have very fast GPUs, so it's not noticably different from a small file.

I got a HUGE one once, 200 MB, and I had to work with it on a laptop for a few days while out of town. I wasn't drawing, I was doing a takeoff. I found that for most purposes, DraftSight was sufficient and probably 10X faster than AutoCAD in loading, rendering, and panning around. Another fast way for read-only work is to plot the drawing to a pdf, then load it with Foxit reader. That's even faster than DraftSight.

Most of mine that I do from scratch are much smaller, in the 20- to 100 kB range.

7-zip crunches a 20 MB file down to about 5 MB is storage is getting out of hand.

Best to you,

Goober Dave

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Save the drawing as a Wblock then explode it.
 
Yes, many purges. Then many explodes. Then purges again. Then bind xrefs. Then purges again. Then manual deletion of many unused layers.

That takes some time, but I do it if I have to draw. If I'm just reviewing or taking off material quantities, I use the DraftSight or Foxit pdf reader methods.

Best to you,

Goober Dave

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