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memoht
memoht
Inspiring
February 19, 2018
Answered

PDFs export from InDesign are much larger than expected

  • February 19, 2018
  • 4 replies
  • 2883 views

We have been using InDesign in production since 2001 and switched to CC versions last year. One common thing we do is export a lower resolution PDF for previews of our product. Typical settings include:

  • Acrobat 8/9 (PDF 1.7)
  • Bicubic downsampling to (125 ppi, Automatic (JPEG), Quality: medium or high)
  • Compress text and line art, Crop image data to frames
  • No marks, bleeds or slugs
  • Either: "No Color Conversion" or "Convert to Destination Adobe RGB (1998)"
  • Subset fonts less than 100%
  • Optimize for Fast Web, Visible Layers

For a general rule, an 8-page publication would produce PDFs that varied between 3.5 - 6Mb. Starting a couple of weeks ago, we are seeing files of similar size and specs come in at 15-17Mb.

Having done this for a long time with a fairly stable product (mix of images, logos, etc) I am wondering if Adobe made some changes to PDF export functionality that would account for such a dramatic increase in file size. !

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer memoht

I appreciate the input from everyone on this question. I ended up using the "Audit space usage" feature under Acrobat PDF Optimizer to see what was bloating this file. On a 17Mb file, 13Mb (75%)was for "shading information". I exported each page from the publication separately and was able to identify the culprits. One of our designers had a rather small ad that was making heavy use of "drop shadow" effects which appear to be the cause of the file bloat. It also had an illustrator file in the background with heavy transparency effects. I removed this single ad (which appears twice in the paper) and the resulting PDF dropped to 2.87Mb.

I wanted to come back here to post my findings in case someone else runs across this problem. Play carefully with transparency effects.

4 replies

memoht
memohtAuthorCorrect answer
Inspiring
February 21, 2018

I appreciate the input from everyone on this question. I ended up using the "Audit space usage" feature under Acrobat PDF Optimizer to see what was bloating this file. On a 17Mb file, 13Mb (75%)was for "shading information". I exported each page from the publication separately and was able to identify the culprits. One of our designers had a rather small ad that was making heavy use of "drop shadow" effects which appear to be the cause of the file bloat. It also had an illustrator file in the background with heavy transparency effects. I removed this single ad (which appears twice in the paper) and the resulting PDF dropped to 2.87Mb.

I wanted to come back here to post my findings in case someone else runs across this problem. Play carefully with transparency effects.

    rob day
    Community Expert
    rob dayCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 21, 2018

    There's also this script for clearing Photoshop metadata.

    Prepression: Metadata Bloat – photoshop:DocumentAncestors

    Stephen Marsh
    Community Expert
    Stephen MarshCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 21, 2018

    I’d work on a dupe, then try solution #4:

    Prepression: Metadata Bloat – photoshop:DocumentAncestors

    If this does reduce the file size, then go back to the source images and see if they are bloated with photoshop:DocumentAncestors metadata and then test if the removal of this metadata from the images reduces the file size of the final PDF. I am not sure if relinking and a save as is all that is required, or if you would potentially need to delete, save as, then place the images again to force InDesign to “let go” of the redundant metadata.

    Dov Isaacs
    Dov Isaacs
    Legend
    February 21, 2018

    FWIW, I do quite a bit of exporting of PDF from InDesign both for professional purposes here within Adobe as well as for personal projects and over the last number of releases, have seen no appreciable difference in the size of the exported PDF assuming the same content and the same export joboptions.

    There have been no significant changes in the PDF export code in any recent releases of InDesign (or for that matter, Illustrator or Photoshop).

    As Bob Levine indicated, without samples (including the source files and the resultant PDF files in earlier and current releases of InDesign), it is impossible to guess as to what is going on.

              - Dov

    - Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
    BobLevine
    Community Expert
    BobLevineCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 19, 2018

    There is absolutely no way to tell what’s up with these files without looking at them. If you want to shrink them up a bit, save them as optimized PDFs in Acrobat.

    memoht
    memohtAuthor
    Inspiring
    February 19, 2018

    I do realize that each PDF is specific which is why I tried to word this in a general way. For example, if one publication was full of large images where previous were not, I would not be surprised. The general question would be if any other users have noticed much larger PDFs generating from InDesign recently using settings that have previously yielded smaller files.

    Optimizing PDFs in Acrobat is having little to no effect on file size. Even reducing image quality and PPI settings are not having much effect.

    BobLevine
    Community Expert
    BobLevineCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 19, 2018

    That would be typical of a PDF with a lot of vector data.

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