PTC Drafting can handle very big drawings, typically the layouts of a plant. There is no limit except the power of the computer. If the power is not high enough, the response time will be high.

Layouts of plant are big because they contains unnecessary small elements (lines, arcs, circles).

Numbers of lines can be as small as 1 mm long, or less. With a scale of 1:100, their length are less than 0.01 mm on a PDF file.

The main sources of small lines, or in general, of small elements are:

• The assembly drawings composing the layout are designed with all the smallest parts, necessary for that type of drawing.
• Over-representation of parts: trade marks are sometimes engraved on some parts (example: pipe fittings).
• Drawings generated by 3D CAD can have small elements, even from big parts when they are hidden at 99% by other parts.

One solution is to remove the small elements. How to?

• With Drafting, by macro.
• With a separate program.

By macro, it is easy to do, but the processing time is too long. Therefore, I selected the program because of the speed. It removes the small lines (LIN), circles (CIR) and arcs (ARC).

Note: the program does not remove the associated entities (dimensions, hatching, infos, ...). Therefore, after loading the cleaned file, you may encounter warning messages. This is to tell that Drafting has removed automatically the associated entities having no more association in the drawing.