File size after split

[LasseThid]

I have a customer who send me rather big pdf-files (2 Gb+) and I need to perform color matching on these pdf files.

When I try to split the pdf into single pages in Enfocus Switch with the Adobe Acrobat Professional configurator Acrobat will crash. If I use Enfocus Split PDF configurator it will crash due to an time out error.

So I decided to try to split the pdf into several smaller files, however the file size remains the same regardless of whether the file contains one or 52 pages. If I save the pdf as a postscript file and then destill the postscript file the pdf with be about 5 Mb rather than the 311 Mb the original file is, but why is it that I have to go thru the postscript - destill steps in order to reduce the file size? It seems like Acrobat when splitting a pdf file keeps everything in the file, but disables viewing/output of the discarded pages until you select to create a postscript file. Then and only then Acrobat will trash everything not related to the page, hence reducing the file size of the destilled page.

[Bernd Alheit]

How does you split the PDF file?

[LasseThid]

I go to Order Pages and select Split and set it to one page per file.

[Bernd Alheit · Accepted solution]

There you can split by "File Size".

[LasseThid]

You learn something new every day...

Thanks for the info. I'll try to split the file with a smaller filesize and see what happens!

[LasseThid]

Well, it could have worked...

I get the exact same result as if I split into segments of one page, i.e. 52 files 311 Mb each from a single 311 Mb file with 52 pages.

[Bernd Alheit]

Open the PDF Optimizer and click on "Audit space usage...". What can you see there?

[LasseThid]

Images:  310 816 182 bytes     99.96%

Content streams:  26 447 bytes  0.01%

Document Total: 17 696 bytes 0.01%

Color Areas: 41 652 bytes 0.01%

X object forms: 21 320 bytes 0.01%

Extended graphics: 53 bytes 0.00%

Cross reference tables 4 380 bytes 0.00%

Total: 310 927 730 bytes 100%

[Bernd Alheit]

Did you see the same images on all pages?

[LasseThid]

No. Each pdf is correct, but I think it's rather strange that if you split a 311 Mb 52 page pdf into 52 separate pdf-files then you end up with with 52 pdf files each at 311 Mb and not 52 pdf files with an average of 6-7 Mb...

[Bernd Alheit]

Did you check the audit space on the separate files?

[LasseThid]

[Bernd Alheit]

You can see that the images requires most of the spaces.

[LasseThid]

Sure, but if there is one image per page in the pdf file, then why does the images for the 51 pages I removed still take up space in the only page I saved?

If the images are 6 Mb each (52x6 = 312) then shouldn't the images take up roughly 6 Mb instead of 311 Mb if I remove 51 out of 52 pages?

[Bernd Alheit]

It can be one image in the file and all pages references this image. When you split the file you will get a copy of this image in all separate files.

[LasseThid]

I guess that could be the case, but if I create a postscript file from a page and then use Acrobat Destiller to create a new pdf then the new pdf is 4.7 Mb. If it was one huge image that every page reference I would assume the new pdf to also be 311 Mb, right?

[Karl Heinz Kremer]

When you convert to PostScript, you may also downsample the images (or otherwise convert them so that they take up less space). You can find out by using the Output Preview function in Acrobat Pro:

With the Object Inspector selected, click on the image in your original PDF file and on the image in your file that went through PostScript and back to PDF. You should be able to see the size of the image, how many bits per pixel of data there is, it's resolution, and it's color space. When you compare the two, you should be able to tell if there is difference between the two.

If you find that you have too much data in your images, you can first downsample the images in Acrobat using the PDF Optimizer (the same tool that you've used to find out how space is used in your PDF file).

[Robert36516680uvpe]

It's now 2024 and I just tried to do a similar (and one would think, quite simple) task, and am running into the same problem - my 6,000 page 770.3 MB pdf gets split into separate (whether by "pages" or by "size")...770.3 MB files.  Who thought this was a good idea?  What a nightmare Adobe and their handling of pdfs has become.

[try67]

If your file contains the same 770MB image on each page then that resource only exists once in the 6000+ pages file. When you split the pages a separate copy of it has to be embedded in each one of those individual files, hence each one of them also being 770 MB ... I don't know if that's the case in your file (since you didn't share it), but it would explain what you're seeing. This is actually a very good thing. Imagine you needed a unique copy of a 770MB image on each one of the 6000+ pages in the original file.