Spent 3 days on a simple permit drawing for a deck in Springfield

The city's online portal kept rejecting my PDFs because the file size was too big, even though they looked fine. I tried compressing them three different ways before I found out they needed the exact version of Adobe Acrobat to save it 'right'. Has anyone else run into this with their local building department?

3 comments

3 Comments

taylor30518d agoTop Commenter

Wait, they seriously required a specific version of Adobe Acrobat just to save a PDF correctly? That's insane lmao. I would have lost my mind after three days of fighting with that portal. The fact that they don't just accept any compressed PDF is wild to me, especially when the city is supposed to make things easier for people. Compressing files is basic stuff, not some rocket science secret handshake. Sounds like whoever set up that system never actually tried to use it themselves. That's a total nightmare and I'm sorry you had to deal with it.

the_alex1mo ago

Ugh, classic government software lock-in.

spencer_moore391mo ago

But is it really that big a deal? They probably just went with what they already had.