PDF Print Server - Convert Architect Plans

[Thilo.H]

Hey guys, 

so I work as a civil engineer and try to optimize/digitize my workflows. A lot of stuff work pretty good with my iPad but the architect plans are printed to DIN A1 or even A0 (PDF) . My iPad pro 10,5" can't handle that papersize and just close everything when I try to open it. So I Iike to scale the plans down to A3. We talking about a few hundreds plans. 

Have anybody an Idea how I can automate the progress? Just thought about having a "hot folder" with all my Plans that will automatic convert to A3 ? Would it work with a Print Server ? 

[AbsoluteFool]

52 minutes ago, Kackstelze said:

Hey guys, 

so I work as a civil engineer and try to optimize/digitize my workflows. A lot of stuff work pretty good with my iPad but the architect plans are printed to DIN A1 or even A0 (PDF) . My iPad pro 10,5" can't handle that papersize and just close everything when I try to open it. So I Iike to scale the plans down to A3. We talking about a few hundreds plans. 

Have anybody an Idea how I can automate the progress? Just thought about having a "hot folder" with all my Plans that will automatic convert to A3 ? Would it work with a Print Server ? 

A print server is to organize print processes. It will not change formats or file sizes. What you should look into however is something that can change the file size and type. Nearly like a streaming server would transcode the file output for live streaming.

 

Sadly i got no idea what type of software that would be. But i'm sure someone in here have an idea..

 

 

[Thilo.H]

8 hours ago, AbsoluteFool said:

A print server is to organize print processes. It will not change formats or file sizes. What you should look into however is something that can change the file size and type. Nearly like a streaming server would transcode the file output for live streaming.

 

Sadly i got no idea what type of software that would be. But i'm sure someone in here have an idea..

 

 

mhhh... sounds more complicated than I hoped for. My idea with the print server was to set the default settings for A3 and let it Print all files from an specific Folder. But on the other hand i properly will lose a lot of quality.

So Transcoding the files seems to be the only option. Anybody an idea how I can do that ? cost aren't that important. 
 

[AbsoluteFool]

16 minutes ago, Kackstelze said:

mhhh... sounds more complicated than I hoped for. My idea with the print server was to set the default settings for A3 and let it Print all files from an specific Folder. But on the other hand i properly will lose a lot of quality.

So Transcoding the files seems to be the only option. Anybody an idea how I can do that ? cost aren't that important. 
 

Sorry, i got no idea about software that can do that. However i can guess if you just use a print server and a standard format for all of the files you will end up with poor quallity and probably loss on information, or a clutter of papers.

 

But on the otherhand. i could be wrong and it could work. You can always try to just print out a file in A3 before even trying to set up a print server? If it then works your idea with print server should work aswell. While it's a long shot, i can't imagine it'll be a big loss of time to test it.

[dalekphalm]

7 hours ago, Kackstelze said:

mhhh... sounds more complicated than I hoped for. My idea with the print server was to set the default settings for A3 and let it Print all files from an specific Folder. But on the other hand i properly will lose a lot of quality.

So Transcoding the files seems to be the only option. Anybody an idea how I can do that ? cost aren't that important. 
 

You can do this with Adobe Acrobat Pro, but there's still some manual actions needed:

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2201813

 

Check out that forum post:

Quote

Printing a PDF file to PDF is almost always a bad idea and (as you found out) will always degrade the quality of your PDF file. Which version of Acrobat do you have? In Acrobat DC Pro, you can resize a PDF page by using a Preflight function. This preflight profile can be called from an action, so you could then use the Action Wizard to process multiple files with just a fe mouse clicks.

 

[Umberto]

I googled a bit and found this: http://community.coherentpdf.com

Source, binary and manual provided. If you are on linux/macos you can set up a shell script to watch a certain folder and run 

cpdf -scale-to-fit a3portrait in.pdf -o out.pdf

whenever a new file is added. On windows you could probably do something similar.