Hi,
This has been bothering me for a while:
I like to generate a PDF of the enroute charts and print it later in order to take a paper copy as a backup to my iPad.
The generated PDFs are MASSIVE in size. It takes ages to open them - the different layers are built up individually in the Adobe Reader and on slow computers (such as often found at flight schools, rental outfits) will never open. It also takes ages to print them and sometimes, some layers (or colors?) or omitted, resulting in unusable print outs (after spending half on hour getting the printer to print them).

Has this been noted before? Is there going to be a better implementation of the PDF printing feature?
Regards

Patrick

"Sorry, there's no way we would make such sweeping changes to our chart rendering process just because print-to-PDF utilities produce large PDFs."

I can perfectly accept that - SD is a great product and each version has come with very useful and thought-through enhancements and I realize you guys must have a queue of things to realize that prioritize higher than this, but just for the sake of understanding...

"I am not altogether surprised, as there's a lot of vector detailing in our charts and we certainly wouldn't do anything to compromise that."

The vector detail is obviously a huge benefit within the application during planning and navigating. I do not see the advantage of "sending" that level of detail to a printer (regardless if it's a physical machine or a PDF converter). In both cases, the result will be a flat image with a set resolution anyway - why not (apart from the prioritization with other enhancements, see above) send bitmap image data (compressed?) to the printer?

For what it's worth, here's a sample file I generated from the Print Center:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/28023189/document.pdf