Export from Indesign is too large

[keving50156231]

 I create about a 12MB pdf from Indesign.  I've tried reducing the size of a PDF and that never get the file small enough and the pictures look grainy as well.  Currently I have a Indesign file that has some jpegs in it, some Illustrator files and then some PDF's as well.  The final Indesign file is about 6-7MB but after I export it to PDF, the pdf is 12MB and I can't put that on our website because the website has a max of 2MB.  The PDF's that are inside the Indesign file were made in Solidworks and printed to a PDF and then placed in the Indesign file.  I'd prefer to not have to remake the individual PDF's from Solidworks but if that is what you recommend, then I'll have to tackle that project.  

I was on chat with Adobe and everything they tried, was stuff you see on their help site and that just degrades every picture and why would we go thru the work of making nice drawings and then degrade them.  I can't be the only person who has a large Indesign file that needs to send the exported final pdf by email or post on a website and needs it smaller than 5 MB.  Any help would be appreciated.  Has anyone ever tried the booklet option where you create each page separately and then bring all the PDF final pages together to create a book?  I have a feeling that wouldn't help my situation though but willing to try anything.

[Dov Isaacs]

Simply stated, you cannot legislate the size of a PDF file to some preconceived notion of a maximum size.

If your original InDesign document is “6-7MB” it does not count the size of (1) the placed external images and PDF files and (2) of the fonts used for the text, a resultant PDF file of 12MB is not all that large, either in absolute size or even in comparison with the majority of graphically-rich production PDF files available for download on the web.

Any effort that you make to reduce the size of the exported PDF has consequences, primarily on the quality of raster images in the final PDF file. Using lower quality compression (smaller file size) yields image artifacts that are especially obvious for raster images that represent vector-like content. Downsampling the images will lead to pixelation and graininess. (Remember that current high quality displays and even phones and tablets now range from 200+ to 350DPI in resolution, surpassing the resolution needs that were previously considered adequate for high resolution printing.) Thus, any mucking around with raster image quality settings and image resolution are potentially very lossy in terms of the quality of rendering of the resultant PDF file.

The real bottom line is that a web site that limits PDF files to such sizes as 2MB or 5MB is absolutely ludicrous, Many websites actually download that much HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and imagery just to display a first screen for a user. Putting up such arbitrary (and capricious) size limits for PDF files to be explicitly downloaded from a web site is at least 10 to 15 years out of date with reality. Time for you to have a good heart-to-heart discussion with whoever is managing the website on which you wish to place your content.

                 - Dov

[Laubender]

Hi Kevin,

even without downsampling when exported the images look "grainy".

Even the technical drawings. Why? Because parts of a graphic is bitmap, parts of the same graphic is vector.

And the resolution of the bitmap part is not very good. Or better put: The resolution maybe ok and very highres, but the quality of the pixels is very bad.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

[Document Geek]

You can try taking the output PDF into Acrobat and running the "Optimize for Web and Mobile Devices" action on it. But the whole point of that is that it's going to deletes extra data. So the resulting PDF will not look as good. Here are some things to consider:

• How many pages is your document?
• How big are those pages (in inches)?
• How large (in MB) are the images and PDFs you placed into your InDesign document?

All of these things need to be taken into account. If the only thing that can be changed in the above three items is the image compression, then yes, your images are not going to look as good when they are massively compressed.

I took a 66MB PDF (of engineering drawings from Solidworks) ran the Optimize for Web action on it, and Acrobat reduced it to 43.7 MB. I'm sorry to tell you this, but I think it's a big stretch to get a 16 MB PDF to reduce to less than 2 MB and still expect it to look great.

Trying different methods of exporting the PDF (via the booklet function or otherwise) won't help you acheive what you're trying to accomplish. Why not post it to Dropbox (or some other cloud service) and then provide people with the link to download it? That's what I do with my PDFs and it works great. There is no file size limitation, and people can still view the file right within a web browser.

[keving50156231]

Here is the link to the dropbox file for the indesign file and the pdf that was created.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/w1omlbftjranmvi/AADnV0XWm6EENswNmfFZFGHGa?dl=0

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Most of your file size is from "Content Stream" which is usually from vector files (.ai files). I was able to reduce it a couple of megs, but it would be difficult to go more than that. I'm suspecting that SolidWorks is not making very compact PDFs and the info effectively being passed through ID.

I was able to get one of the SW's PDFs about 66% smaller with Acrobat Pro. Presumably, if all the grapics were processed the same way, you would get down to about 8-9 MB.

If you can't convince the website to allow larger PDFs, you may have to break this one into 2 MB sections.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

What are your export settings?

[BobLevine]

If this is a Wordpress site you can most certainly increase the maximum upload size:

https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-increase-the-maximum-file-upload-size-in-wordpress/

[Laubender]

On further inspection:

One placed PDF with technical drawings, the bitmap parts of it, is showing a resolution of 127 ppi.

So the damage is already done in the placed PDF.

Placed Ag Pro Classic Replacement Wear parts.pdf on page 34 for example.

Was placed with 100%. I opened that PDF with Acrobat Pro and did Edit Image with PhotoShop. The result:

Just to show one example…

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )