PDF Compression?

[Ben Lehman]

I'm trying to produce a PDF of a rather long document, and I can't get inDesign to spit out a file under 7 MB. That seems unnecessarily large to me. Does anyone have advice for decreasing the file size?

yrs--
--Ben

[Kevin Allen Jr]

There is a program that Adobe makes called Adobe Distiller. I'm not sure how this program works (technically speaking) but you save your PDF as a Postscript file, open it in Adobe Distiller and then blammo this gigantic file is really tiny, and not lossy at all (i don't know how).

I use it at work all the time, where i've taken PDFs that were literally 280mb and gotten them down to 560k. It was amazing, i couldn't tell what was taken out, everything looked as good as the original. Apparently it's no good for printers, but on screen... its like god making love to a star.

[Adam]

Actually, printing to postscript then Distiller is still the recommended way that many printers want you to create files, especially if you're using one of the earlier version of InDesign. Distiller does compress and downsample images, and depending on your settings, can cause a loss of quality ... but, that comes with the territory when making PDFs from any application.

Ben, without seeing the document and the settings you're using to export, it's hard to advise on how to fix it. Printing to Postscript and then distilling [with the same settings you're using for Export] may produce a smaller PDF, but it may also be a matter of tweaking the export options, and perhaps the actual files you're feeding it. If you don't mind packaging up the InDesign document and related files and putting them online where I could grab them, I'll take a look at it and see if I can figure out a way to crunch it down.

[btrc]

From long experience I'd say the "print to postscript" and Acrobat Distiller gives you the most flexibility in terms of output parameters, but there are cheaper products that do the trick. There are also programs that can trim the size through various arcane means like pulling header information off image files to scavenge bytes, or using a different compression algorithm on different types of images (color. greyscale, monochrome). There are also basic tricks that you might have overlooked.

1) If a page uses an image in a box and the image is larger than the box, the extra unseen bits of image may still be in the file. Go into photoshop and trim the image there to fit exactly in the space provided.

2) If you have graphic borders or recurring graphic elements, trying generating them as a vector file (like EPS) rather than a jpeg or tiff. The EPS version distills -way- smaller.

3) Make sure if you do any tweaking ofthe pdf after you create it, do a "save as" rather than a "save". Many pdf editors will go through the file and try to optimize it when you save it to a different file name.

Greg Porter