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N
Nikos Vardakis
Inspiring
June 20, 2023
Question

Prevent Acrobat pro from reducing file size when saving

  • June 20, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 3478 views

I have a pdf document that is 330 MB. I open it in Acrobat pro, replace a page with only text in it (not images), and close the document. Acrobat asks me to save before closing. I chose "Save" and when it finishes, the document file size is reduced to 40 MB!!

The same thing has happened before and I cannot figure out what causes that.

These are pdf files I have to send for printing, and I cannot reduce the file size so much!

Any ideas??

Thanks!

2 replies

mariahweyne
mariahweyne
Inspiring
June 21, 2023

Check your preferences - 

Edit-Preferences-Documents - Save Settings - make sure the are not clicked.

 

N
Nikos VardakisAuthor
Inspiring
June 22, 2023

No, nothing like that is clicked

try67
Community Expert
try67Community Expert
Community Expert
June 20, 2023

The Save As command optimizes the file and removes unnecessary data (for example, duplicated image streams and fonts). Surely this is a good thing, as long as it doesn't reduce the quality of the file in any way? Why do you think it will prevent you from printing it properly?

N
Nikos VardakisAuthor
Inspiring
June 20, 2023

Hello and thank you for your reply!

It will be printed normally on a house printer but what about a typographer's printing machine? 

I don't want to risk any data loss because it is a 300 pages book, which is going to be printed to 2000 copies.

It's not that it loses some megabytes... The file is reduced about 85% of its original size...

try67
Community Expert
try67Community Expert
Community Expert
June 20, 2023

Imagine each page of the 300-page document has a background image that's 1MB in size, but they are all the same.

The optimization might remove 299 copies of that image (=299MB from the file size) and replace it with a reference to the 1 copy that remains on the first page. No data has been lost since the PostScript printer knows how to access that image data each time it needs it for printing, but the file size has been reduced significantly.

Anyway, if you don't want that to happen then only use Save, and then rename the file outside of Acrobat.

Also, I would first print a proof copy of the file, examine it closely and make sure it's correct, and only then print the rest of the 1999 copies of it... This is standard procedure in all large-scale printing jobs.

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