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bianca11
New Participant
May 20, 2017
Question

PDF file size increasing for some files and not others

  • May 20, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 3396 views

I all,

I am creating a PDF from Corel Draw - File>Print>Adobe PDF and I get a nice small file size of 181kb. I open that PDF in Acrobat DC and Prepare Form (no fields detected - because there are none). I continue and add my fields where I require them (12 fields, fonts mainly Times New Roman with a couple of other fonts which are True Type Outlines). When I go and save my PDF file it jumps to 3,346kb in size. I created a different file the other night that went from 176kb up to 560kb using the same fonts but 24 fields.

I even copied the 24 fields from the smaller file and pasted it into the other one and still ends up bigger.

Any thoughts?

Thanks
Bianca

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Dov Isaacs
Dov Isaacs
Brainiac
May 21, 2017

What you are reporting is not at all unexpected. There are at least two issues here:

(1)     When you “save” you should always use “save as” instead of “save.” The simple save function simply extends your existing PDF file with a copy of the modified page(s) almost guaranteeing a significant file size increase.

(2)     When you create form fields, Acrobat must embed the fonts used for the form fields into the PDF file itself such that the recipient of the PDF file can properly fill out the forms. In the case of the Times New Roman, the font size is 1.05MB. If you used all four faces of Times New Roman (i.e. regular, italic, bold, and bold italic), you would be adding over 3MB to the file size. (This font family is so big because it supports the characters of many alphabets including Latin languages, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic!)

If you don't need all the characters of the Times New Roman family, smaller fonts will yield much smaller PDF files.

          - Dov

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
B
bianca11Author
New Participant
May 25, 2017

Hi Dov,

Thanks for the response. I did read this in one of the other threads.

Sorry I should have expanded on the point of the other file that didn't increase as much. The issue that I can't figure out is why with a file that is set up as 7" wide by 5" high (landscape) went from 176kb to 560kb but the file set up to be 5" wide by 7" high (portrait) went from 181kb to 3,346kb and both files use the same fonts.

On a side note I did notice an oddity. If I create 2 files using the File>Print (using Adobe's PDF driver) method, 1 file that is portrait and 1 file that is landscape I can't copy the text field from one to the other because it rotates it 90 degrees in the other file. But, if I create those two files using Corel's 'Publish to PDF' I can copy those text fields between both files without them rotating.

Thanks

Bianca

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