User Manual PDF file size

Question

Good morning,I produce technical documentation with indesign. I generate a PDF file for use by private users and installers.The practice adopted by my collegue is to generate two versions of the same file: a high resolution version and a low resolution version. Sometimes it happens that due to the quantity and type of images present in the manual (vector PDF files inserted without any post-production intervention), the low resolution PDF file has dimensions slightly smaller than the high resolution version (a few hundred kB on a total of eight MB). This makes creating a lowres PDF file unnecessary (in my opinion).I would add that looking online at "what others do", I see that no one bothers to publish a low resolution version of their user manual; usually an RGB version of the manual is published which weighs several MB.What is your opinion?How do you do it?Thank you.

Willi Adelberger · Answer

The print version needs PDF boxes and bleeds. Those blow up with the color profile the file size. The screen version needs hyperlinks,  bookmarks, interactive cross references and the same with interactive toc and possible an interactive index. I export those PDFs as interactive PDFs which have usually smaller file sizes.

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