How to manage illustrator and photoshop files placed in indesing and exported to pdf for small size

[scottt30070861]

Hi there, 

I am an urban designer and I am frequently working on documents in Ai and PSD and PDF files (placed later on in InDesign book, about 100 - 200 pages, each page contains one or more Ai or PSD files).

The files I am working on are large but mostly done in illustrator for the benefit of the vector-based drawings but I am also using photoshop files when other images are needed. 

My workflow looks as follows:

1. I am creating illustrator, photoshop, pdf files

2. I am creating InDesign book and placing the above files into InDesign with layer dependency enabled

3. I am adding all relevant text in the InDesign book. 

4. Exporting the whole book to pdf file for sharing.

5. And printing the whole document as a hard copy for submissions.

After all that process, I am ending up with a huge pdf file that crashed in the Acrobat Reader.

Even if I will try the reduce the file size in Acrobat it is still very big and very hard to print.

My question is, does anyone know any process I can follow in terms of saving all types mentioned before along the way, in order to get a reasonably sized pdf file, rather than a huge, chunky problem to manage?

I understand that this might not be a question directly posted to Ai users but maybe someone can have an idea how to handle this problem.

Thank you guys so much.

Kamila 

[Bill Silbert · Accepted solution]

What is the effective resolution of the Photoshop files that you've been bringing into the InDesign files? While Acrobat is able to even out resolution, I have always preferred to make sure that Photoshop images (which I prefer as tiffs or psds) are brought into InDesign at 100% size with a resolution of 300 ppi (which is the definition of "effective resolution").  I have always found this an efficient way to construct an InDesign file. Working this way means that all resolution issues are taken care of before the file is exported to either a pdf or directly for print. I know that there are other points of view about this since, as I said earlier, Acrobat is capable of evening out resolution. But your question was about ways that you could proactively prepare files.

In regard to your vector Illustrator files. If you are creating complex illustrations with many, many points then that could be a factor. In some cases you can use the simplify path feature https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/simplify_paths.html to cut down on unnecessary points which will cut down on the complexity involved in outputting them. For Illustrator I always prefer to save the files as .ai rather than pdf.

[scottt30070861]

Hi Bill, Thanks for your reply.

I have been putting the PSD and AI files into the inDesign because of the layer dependency option. It allows me to use one file multiple times with relevant layers on or off. 

My PSD files are 150 - 300 dpi, though I use more Ai files in my docs

Yes, I should probably reduce the number of points in the Ai graphics... Thanks for the link! 

Do you know what resolution should be the Ai files, pls? I don't even know if you can set this up or not?

Thank you.

[Bill Silbert]

Since .ai files are vector resolution is not a factor. You can enlarge or reduce vector files with no loss of quality.