suggestion on making an indesign catalog small enough for emailing

[philipf80937207]

All,

I have a 22 page color catalog (8.5"x11") designed for print. When I export a smallest size pdf 121dpi version for emailing it's still 44 megs. All images and graphics have been sized to use at 100% and i followed standards best practice setting for removing bloat in the pdf creation. I've tried many different avenues for shrinking but none yeild good results.

My last ditch effort was to make a full size pdf > open the pages in photoshop and then size the resulting psd's down to 96dpi and convert to JPEG from there I combined the jpegs in acrobat to form one pdf. this reduced me down to 13megs but I still have less than desirable quality in the text blocks throughout. Any great ideas would be helpful.

[BobLevine]

There may be nothing you can do. Put it on a web server and email a download link.

[philipf80937207]

Thanks Bob. That's what I've suggested to the boss but he wants sales people to be able to email it out to propects 😒

[BobLevine]

What the boss wants is irrelevant in this case. The salespeople can email a link as easily as a file.

[David Popham]

Graphics are typically what cause large file sizes for PDFs exported from InDesign. What kinds of image files are in your InDesign file? Are there any vector format (.ai, .eps, .pdf) map files? Those can create a lot of bloat in a PDF, especially if they are not properly streamlined for output and contain hundreds of unnecesary path points and high-resolution bitmap backgrounds.

Using JPEGs for PDFs is not advisable, as the files are not searchable nor accessible, and as you indicated, reader experience will suffer if the resolution isn't high enough.

[philipf80937207]

all AI vectors have been converted to jpegs at true size. That didn't help at all (I thought it would). All product images are jpeg at 100%. Using acrobat optimize auditer I find the issue pictured but not sure what to change to affect it. I dont have any gradients in the layout. I am converting the pdf to sRGB on export as well.

[rob day]

There have been some discussions in the past about Photoshop history metadata coming in with placed files and bloating InDesign documents. See the end of this thread: https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign/file-size-is-too-big/td-p/9370587?page=2#10084949

The fact that your audit shows the image data taking lass than 2mb suggests that the bloat is some kind of info—I don’t know what pattern information actually means, but maybe it is metadata?

Does the excessive file size happen if you export page ranges? If you export the first half and then the last half, are both PDFs equally large? Can you package the doc and links and share it via Dropbox or your CC account?

[philipf80937207]

I've exported in two seperate files (first half, last half) both files are roughly the same size and can be inspected here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ahydr8lxt2yt7nd/AADLTKlgR2vEfQCgKsVyeTZaa?dl=0

Hoping to find someone who knows what the (pattern information) reference in acrobat's auditor panel is.

[rob day · Accepted solution]

Luke is right, if you look at page 3 of the first section the patterns have been rasterized, but on page 4 they have been left as vectors. If I extract and save page 4, its file size is 40mb, but page 3 extracted is only 621K. Or, deleting page 4 reduces the file size of the first part to 2mb.

[rob day]

We would need you to package the ID file with its assets in order to check if it is the metadata problem.

[Luke Jennings3 · Accepted solution]

Some of the pattern backgrounds behind the dimensions contain complex vectors, If you rasterize them or reduce the complexity, your PDF size will decrease. 

[philipf80937207]

Thanks for the input. I'll give that a try and see if it is indeed the pattern culprit.

[philipf80937207]

This nail it on the head. final 150dpi pdf output went from 40 megs to 5 megs. I had converted all other ai files to jpeg or png but had overlooked those six files. Thank you much. 🙏🏼😃

[Creamer Training]

Try this in Acrobat Pro:

1. Run Redact and Remove Hidden Information.
2. Run Optimize PDF and use Advanced Optimization
   1. The only change I made was setting color and grayscale images to 150 ppi if over 150 ppi.

I got the combined 84 MB + down to about 6 MB.

I ran it on section one of your PDF and it went from about 42 MG to just over 2 MG

[philipf80937207]

thanks so much. I'll give that a try and report back the reesults for posterity.

[philipf80937207]

The redact>remove hidden info works well but removes png transparency and makes a mess of dropshadow placement on psd transparency. If i uncheck: deleted or cropped content & overlapping objects then the transpaency is left intact but the file size reduction becomes negliglible. from 65 megs at print quality to 42 megs after redact and optimize to 150ppi.

[Creamer Training]

I'm not seeing any major issues. Can you upload a screen capture?

[philipf80937207]

The ai files mentioned above we're the culprits. I was able to use your redact suggestion as well to shave another meg of for hidden info. When I use the critera mentioned above for cropped content and overlappin gobject I get this result.

before:

after: