u/Rockstonerable — reddlx

What's the worst CAD PDF your team has ever had to mark up?

Curious about other practitioners' experience.

Quick context: I'm a partner at Noir Architects, a Baltic architecture studio (ArchiCAD shop). For years our team has cycled through Adobe, Nitro, and Bluebeam for marking up exported PDFs. Typical files we deal with: 100–300 MB, 50–300 pages, transparency-heavy with vector overlays. Each tool failed in its own way:

- Adobe — slows to a crawl past about 80 MB. Text edits on CAD-embedded fonts are unreliable. Search across image-heavy pages misses content.

- Nitro — better speed than Adobe on big files, but annotation handling on rotated pages is glitchy.

- Bluebeam — the closest fit for construction markup, but the UI complexity hurts every junior we onboard. We've spent days teaching people to find the five tools they actually need.

Eventually we got fed up and built our own PDF tool. It's been used daily inside our studio for months — heavy ArchiCAD exports no longer freeze, and the interface is intentionally minimal. 14-day free trial, then €12.99/month or €79.99/year if anyone asks.

I'll skip the link in this post (don't want to be that guy). Real question:

What's the worst PDF your team has ever had to mark up, and what tool finally handled it? Specifically interested in:

- File size + page count

- Source software (ArchiCAD / Revit / Vectorworks / AutoCAD / Bricscad)

- What broke (lag, crash, font issues, annotation loss, save corruption)

- What you ended up using and whether it stuck

Honest war stories would help me figure out which bottleneck to attack next.

Disclosure: I'm one of the makers. Happy to share the link in DMs if anyone wants to take a look.

reddit.com

u/Rockstonerable — 6 days ago

▲ 29 r/ArchiCAD+2 crossposts

Side-by-side: Ncored vs Nitro opening a 200 MB construction PDF

Native macOS PDF editor I've been working on, built for users who routinely open 100–300 MB CAD/BIM exports.

Video is 1:1 — same Mac (MacBook m4 pro), same file, same moment. No edits.

Why I'm posting in here: the Mac build shipped today, Apple-signed + notarized, and you're the audience that actually notices when an app feels native.

Things this thing focuses on:

- Stays responsive on 200 MB files (pinch zoom + scroll don't stutter)

- Quick Look–style fast opening, even for 200+ page documents

- Native window controls, native file dialogs, native fonts

- Crash-safety: if it ever crashes mid-edit, your work is recovered on next open

- Memory footprint stays bounded on long sessions

Features: inline text editing, annotations + signatures (with verification), full-document search incl. text inside scanned images, page management, redaction, flatten, image export, auto-save + crash recovery.

What it isn't: a 200-feature Acrobat clone — we cut a lot deliberately.

Pricing:

- 14-day free trial, no card

- €12.99/month or €79.99/year (≈49% less than monthly). No tiers, no upsells.

Disclosure: I'm one of the makers (the team behind Noir Architects, a Baltic architecture studio that built this for our own daily work first). Honest feedback welcome, especially the rough edges.

Download: https://ncored.com

u/Rockstonerable — 3 days ago

▲ 2 r/SideProject

A PDF editor that doesn't choke on 200 MB construction drawings

I'm a partner at Noir Architects, a Baltic architecture studio. For years our team fought the same fight every week: open a 150 MB+ PDF coming out of our drawing software, try to mark it up, watch Adobe / Nitro / Bluebeam either spin or freeze for 30 seconds at a time.

We tried every obvious tool. Bluebeam came closest, but the workspace is buried under hundreds of features we never touch — onboarding a new hire takes a full week.

After one too many freeze-ups during a client presentation, we put together a small team and built the PDF editor we actually wanted. Two years of work later it's been running daily inside our own studio for months, and we just opened it up publicly.

What it focuses on:

- Heavy engineering / construction PDFs that break every other tool

- Annotations, text editing, signatures, search, page management

- Native macOS (Apple-signed + notarized) and Windows

- A deliberately small set of features that we actually use — no toolbar maze

What it isn't:

- A 200-feature Acrobat replacement (we cut a lot on purpose)

Pricing:

- 14-day free trial, no card

- €12.99/month or €79.99/year (≈49% less than monthly). Two plans, no upsell tiers.

Disclosure: I'm one of the makers. Two honest asks:

If you've shipped a paid desktop app on macOS + Windows, what's one piece of advice you'd give about launch week?
If you're a heavy PDF user — what was the file that finally broke whatever tool you used before?

Link: https://ncored.com

u/Rockstonerable — 7 days ago