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Question

PDFs to Acrobat X Pro from Idcc2017 TOO Large on one document

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
August 24, 2017
4 replies
539 views

I have two books I'm exporting from inDesign to Acrobat X Pro.

One of them is 200 pages, with 500 greyscale images (300 dpi tifs), in 17 chapters. It creates a PDF of just 18.6mb

The other is 168 pages, with 500 greyscale images (300 dpi tifs), in five chapters. It creates a PDF of (smallest yet) 28.3mb.

A combination of the TWO of them, with 4 full-color covers, totalling 373 pages and over 1000 greyscale tifs, creates a PDF of under 20 mb.

I've racked my brain. I've been doing these publications and updating for years, but now, the smaller of the two will simply not reduce no matter what I do.

Can someone tell me where I should be looking in InDesign for some kind of culprit that might have crept in? I really need help on this and I've scoured all I can think of. I've checked all new or revised images to be sure they're greyscale, I've synchronized everything through Bridge, I've done, in short, everything I can think of after having used Acrobat since version 2.0, Photoshop since 2.0, and gotten to InDesign from PageMaker 2.0 through all versions. I've tried all I can think of, but to no avail. Any ideas? Please?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Sherry

This topic has been closed for replies.

JonathanArias

Legend

what is wrong with the file size? in todays era with the wealth of storage and ftp options... what does it matter?

Barb Binder

Community Expert

I'm also curious about your size concerns. Emailing a large file is a more common concern that fitting on a floppy disk this days (that make me laugh out loud, Bob), but that's what services like Dropbox and Adobe Send & Track are for.

How you export the PDF from InDesign will impact the initial file size, and Acrobat has a variety of features designed to reduce the size of an existing PDF, but help us understand what you will be doing with these files, and why the size is the focus.

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

JonathanArias

Legend

floppy disk make great belt buckles.

BobLevine

Community Expert

WHY do these need to be smaller?

If you're looking for an explanation of the what happens when you combine them in Acrobat, it really depends on how you saved them there. Frankly, I fail to see what you're worried about unless they need to fit on a floppy.

I'm going to respectfully disagree with Bill on this. I would never recommend such an archaic way to create a PDF.

Bill Silbert

Community Expert

I do want to make it clear that 99 times out of 100 I think that InDesign’s Export to pdf works just fine. The resurrection of this older technique came about when my agency created a year long campaign that had dozens of spot colored shapes as live InDesign and Illustrator art that all had zillions of points making up their jagged edges. The inclusion of these made for monstrous size pdfs which were far too large for the client required email submissions. After trying every possible way of reducing the pdfs both through InDesign and Acrobat somebody suggested trying the older method. Amazingly, what had been made previously with Export to PDF as a 275 MB pdf was created with this method as 12 MB. And the quality was extremely good.

I present this method as a possible alternative way for the OP to solve their problem.

Bill Silbert

Community Expert

You could try the old school method for making a pdf. In the Print dialog window set the Printer to postscript file and set up all of the functions within the dialog as if you were going to print the job. When you're ready click on Save and you will then be able to choose a destination for the file, choose Desktop. In the Acrobat application folder you'll find a second application called Distiller. Open Distiller and in the drop down menu at the top (Default Settings) choose Smallest File Size. Then drag the postscript file you created right on top of the Distiller window. It will automatically begin making the pdf and when done will leave it on your desktop. The resulting pdf should be of a much smaller size and of really good quality.

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