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philipf80937207
philipf80937207
Participating Frequently
April 3, 2020
Answered

suggestion on making an indesign catalog small enough for emailing

  • April 3, 2020
  • 3 replies
  • 1671 views

All,

I have a 22 page color catalog (8.5"x11") designed for print. When I export a smallest size pdf 121dpi version for emailing it's still 44 megs. All images and graphics have been sized to use at 100% and i followed standards best practice setting for removing bloat in the pdf creation. I've tried many different avenues for shrinking but none yeild good results.

My last ditch effort was to make a full size pdf > open the pages in photoshop and then size the resulting psd's down to 96dpi and convert to JPEG from there I combined the jpegs in acrobat to form one pdf. this reduced me down to 13megs but I still have less than desirable quality in the text blocks throughout. Any great ideas would be helpful.

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Correct answer rob day

I've exported in two seperate files (first half, last half) both files are roughly the same size and can be inspected here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ahydr8lxt2yt7nd/AADLTKlgR2vEfQCgKsVyeTZaa?dl=0

 

Hoping to find someone who knows what the (pattern information) reference in acrobat's auditor panel is.


Luke is right, if you look at page 3 of the first section the patterns have been rasterized, but on page 4 they have been left as vectors. If I extract and save page 4, its file size is 40mb, but page 3 extracted is only 621K. Or, deleting page 4 reduces the file size of the first part to 2mb.

3 replies

Dave Creamer of IDEAS
Community Expert
Dave Creamer of IDEASCommunity Expert
Community Expert
April 13, 2020

Try this in Acrobat Pro:

  1. Run Redact and Remove Hidden Information.
  2. Run Optimize PDF and use Advanced Optimization
    1. The only change I made was setting color and grayscale images to 150 ppi if over 150 ppi.

I got the combined 84 MB + down to about 6 MB.

I ran it on section one of your PDF and it went from about 42 MG to just over 2 MG

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)
philipf80937207
philipf80937207Author
Participating Frequently
April 13, 2020

thanks so much. I'll give that a try and report back the reesults for posterity.

David Popham
David Popham
Participating Frequently
April 3, 2020

Graphics are typically what cause large file sizes for PDFs exported from InDesign. What kinds of image files are in your InDesign file? Are there any vector format (.ai, .eps, .pdf) map files? Those can create a lot of bloat in a PDF, especially if they are not properly streamlined for output and contain hundreds of unnecesary path points and high-resolution bitmap backgrounds.

 

Using JPEGs for PDFs is not advisable, as the files are not searchable nor accessible, and as you indicated, reader experience will suffer if the resolution isn't high enough.

philipf80937207
philipf80937207Author
Participating Frequently
April 3, 2020

all AI vectors have been converted to jpegs at true size. That didn't help at all (I thought it would). All product images are jpeg at 100%. Using acrobat optimize auditer I find the issue pictured but not sure what to change to affect it. I dont have any gradients in the layout. I am converting the pdf to sRGB on export as well.

 

rob day
Community Expert
rob dayCommunity Expert
Community Expert
April 4, 2020

There have been some discussions in the past about Photoshop history metadata coming in with placed files and bloating InDesign documents. See the end of this thread: https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign/file-size-is-too-big/td-p/9370587?page=2#10084949

 

The fact that your audit shows the image data taking lass than 2mb suggests that the bloat is some kind of info—I don’t know what pattern information actually means, but maybe it is metadata?

 

Does the excessive file size happen if you export page ranges? If you export the first half and then the last half, are both PDFs equally large? Can you package the doc and links and share it via Dropbox or your CC account?

BobLevine
Community Expert
BobLevineCommunity Expert
Community Expert
April 3, 2020
There may be nothing you can do. Put it on a web server and email a download link.
philipf80937207
philipf80937207Author
Participating Frequently
April 3, 2020

Thanks Bob. That's what I've suggested to the boss but he wants sales people to be able to email it out to propects 😒

BobLevine
Community Expert
BobLevineCommunity Expert
Community Expert
April 3, 2020

What the boss wants is irrelevant in this case. The salespeople can email a link as easily as a file.

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