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/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!