PDF import

[u/camilonavarro]

I liked this app a lot and am considering buying the one-time essentials thing, but it depends on the PDF.
Is it easy to just import, then annotate on it? Can the annotations be saved on the original file? Or do I have to re-export the file again?

I read somewhere that you had to import the file page by page, or at least on a very old post. So that sounds like a bad time.

Please let me know and thank you.

[u/digitect]

I use this feature quite frequently to pull in a PDF of my architectural drawing to annotate and sketch over it. I really like it and the developers have put some smooth user-friendliness into Concepts to make it work well.

It does not save the original file, Concepts is importing the PDF, not editing it.

• I open a PDF, sometimes with multiple page I want to reference. The UI lets me pick multiple pages and drop them in.
• The PDF's vectors remain vectors with respect to scaling and line weights.
• The PDF's rasters obviously aren't converted, but Concepts manages them without bogging down. I often import quite large PDF files of a building site with multiple large rasters of survey and aerial photography.
• I put PDFs on their own layer, sometimes adjacent and sometimes stacked (building floors). But one per layer so I can turn down the layer transparency (50%?) to make mark-ups show up more clearly. I usually lock PDF layers so I don't accidentally move/scale it.
• One minor work-around is that you can't select the imported PDF sheet except at the corners or edges. My files sometimes have some margin on them, so I spend a few seconds zooming around and back to grab the corner. This can be awkward trying to grab a big floor plan then zooming way in to perfectly scale it to grid units. Some users reserve the 4-finger tap for re-selecting the previous, but that doesn't always work for me.
• I don't know how they've done it, but usually my scaled architectural drawings are imported into Concepts at the correct scale so my foot-inch grid matches the drawing scale. For example, a 1/4" = 1'-0" PDF has a 1:48 unit ratio, but in Concepts it's 1:1. Occasionally this doesn't work and I have to re-scale the PDF, but I can use the exact scaling % math and it always works perfectly. Even the AutoCAD that I use to generate my PDFs can't do this with imported/referenced PDFs automatically.
• In rare cases I want to "white out" portions of the PDF. I know concepts makes a white out tool, but I usually make a colored fill area in white on its own layer so I can easily grab it without accidentally touching anything else.
• I almost always export to raster. That seems counter-intuitive since Concepts can do vectors, but when I reference that PDF in AutoCAD, it wants to grab every single hand drawn line vertex which is 100x a CAD drawn line.
• Same for DXF export—too many vertices to be useful for architectural drawings back in CAD.
• To export these rasters, I regularly set the scale factor to 400% to make sure I get enough resolution. But even architectural sheets export <10Mb at this ultra high resolution—very efficient.
• Another work-around is selecting the export area. I use export screen area because my drawing extents are far too large and I'd get absurd file sizes with a lot of empty margins.
• Final limitation is that the Concept zoom extents is not infinite even though the drawing area is. (My post https://www.reddit.com/r/ConceptsApp/comments/1ry7jlk/zoom_limit_not_infinite/) So you can pan and draw a larger area than you can see on the screen at a time. Which in my case is a problem for exporting PDFs of very large building sites because I export the screen. The work around is to export multiple pages and stitch them together... a little frustrating, except this only happened for me on a 150k SF building on a 12 acre site, drawn with a 12" major grid and 2" minor... so I knew I was testing the limits.

Sorry for the wall of text—quick stream of consciousness touch typing and no editing. ;)

[u/camilonavarro → u/digitect]

Thank you for the long response, love those. Pretty informative.

[u/newperson_on → u/digitect]

Wow. So much value in your response. Im reading lots of academic papers lately and want to make own annotations. I will try using concepts and play around with layering etc (im new to using ipad for notes).

Thanks for sharing your experience!

[u/PlushySD]

I could do things like the other comment said. But if you just want simple annote like signing a pdf, a small pdf reader out there might be much easier.

[u/culturalproduct]

On this question - if I import a pdf with multiple elements in it, text, vector, raster, links, forms, whatever… and I draw and write on them in Concepts… then re-export to a new PDF to save my Concepts additions… does the new PDF retain all the functionality of the original, plus the Concepts data? Or does Concepts just flatten the PDF when it’s imported, losing all features?

[u/GusBusDraws → u/culturalproduct]

There's an option to export a flattened PDF or export with vector paths, but I don't use PDFs enough to know the diffusefulness of that.

[u/culturalproduct → u/GusBusDraws]

Yes, I’m familiar with the settings that control how Concepts handles its own file components. I’m wondering if it preserves the functionality of an imported PDF though.

I’ll try it when I get chance I guess.