Inspiring

Answered

Illustrator generated an error message saying it could not save file as PDF

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
January 8, 2025
4 replies
4665 views

I had a relatively simply Illustrator artwork for a large scale poster. It contained a few vector objects, no type fonts, but a large bitmap texture background (over 500MB uncompressed RGB). I wanted to save it as a PDF for my print provider.

The first attempt at saving it as PDF used the compression setting "JPEG, Medium" — the resulting PDF file was not compressed whatsoever — the file size was exactly the same as the saved AI format file (587.2MB). So then I tried the setting "JPEG 200 (Automatic), Medium" — this attempt failed after several minutes of churning, and generated an error message suggesting I create a File Package Report and send it to Illustrator support.

System Info:
Mac Studio 2023 M2 Max, 32GB RAM, Sonoma 14.7, 2TB SSD with 1.43GB available
Illustrator 29.1

The file is obviously too large to attach, but I have attached the report below.

Cafe_Mural_Art_230_Report.txt

Correct answer mvheim

Success! (again). I finally managed to save teh larger crop version of this art. What I did was break the large background art into 2 pieces in Photoshop and place them as separate images (with some overlap). After I did this, I could save a compressed PDF of 31.8 MB from an original Illustrator file of 592MB.

So what I think I have discovered is that Illustrator is incapable of JPEG compression on placed images larger than 500MB. I am surprised that this limitation is not documented.

M

mvheimAuthorCorrect answer

Inspiring

Success! (again). I finally managed to save teh larger crop version of this art. What I did was break the large background art into 2 pieces in Photoshop and place them as separate images (with some overlap). After I did this, I could save a compressed PDF of 31.8 MB from an original Illustrator file of 592MB.

So what I think I have discovered is that Illustrator is incapable of JPEG compression on placed images larger than 500MB. I am surprised that this limitation is not documented.

Ton Frederiks

Community Expert

Good to hear you've got it working, but I still wonder if it would have worked if you create a new 148 x 16 inches document and paste the content from your problem document in it.

M

mvheimAuthor

Inspiring

You want me to cut & paste a 580MB object? Why won't you believe me when I say I did NOT create a Large Canvas Document? Maybe to start with you could explain how I could have done that inadvertently?

Ton Frederiks

Community Expert

Is your document a Large Canvas File.

It is hard to tell after it is created, but if you zoom out as much as you can does it look something like this?

M

mvheimAuthor

Inspiring

I am afraid I do not know what you mean.

The document artboard was 148 x 16 inches.

Ton Frederiks

Community Expert

Large Canvas documents were introduced to enable full scale large sized documents, but that does not mean they cannot contain small artboards (like in my screendump). Unfortunately these Large Canvas documents behave sometimes unexpectedly with regards to compression. That what I was trying to find out. Creating a new document at the correct size and copy paste the contents in that new document is the only way to convert a Large Canvas document to a regular size canvas document.

This is how a zoomed out, normal canvas 148 x 16 inches artboard would look like.

M

mvheimAuthor

Inspiring

I am continuing to try different settings. I find that it will save successfully as PDF if I use the compression setting "JPEG, Medium", but that it does not actually compress the file size at all. This is a bug, since I have always been able to save files with embedded images at various levels of JPEG compression, and the file size has always reflected the amount of compression. But in this case we are achieving zero compression. What is going on?

Monika Gause

Community Expert

Which other options do you set when saving the file?

Monika Gause

Community Expert

Success! I changed the following aspects of the document:

1. I converted the document to RGB color (the image was already RGB).

2. I cropped the background image so that it did not extend beyond the artboard (it had a small bleed previously).

3. I deleted a trim guide layer which was set Do Not Print (I often include this in files for outside print producers).

Result: PDF file size became 25.2MB rather than 468.2MB. One of these settings somehow prevented Illustrator from compressing the image file. Is any of these a known bug?

That "Bitmap texture background" - can we please see that?

Is that a Bitmap in the sense of a 1 bit image?

In that case you didn't apply a lot of compression (ZIP doeesn't do a lot in this case).

M

mvheimAuthor

Inspiring

Here is a screenshot of the error message:

M

mvheimAuthor

Inspiring

I find it somewhat disturbing that the text of this error message is not properly formatted and does not follow proper English grammar. That seems to imply a certain sloppiness in programming.

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