File size too small

[deejay33]

Hello,

I have the difficult task of troubleshooting an employee who works remotely from another state. What makes it difficult is I cannot see what she is doing I just have to have her discribe what the problem is and then have her try the fixes I come up with.

Well the problem she is having is we upgraded from Acrobat 4 to Acrobat 5 and we cannot seem to get the output settings, using distiller, correct. We use the Acrobat distiller to make pdf files from Quark. We tested the problem by using the same Quark file to distill to pdf from Acrobat 4 and 5. In 4 the file size ends up 8.3 Mb and in 5 it is only 2.4 Mb. The file quality seems to be worse too. I know it sounds like simply a setting difference but I cannot find any difference. One strange thing I noticed in the process is I can modify the dpi setting under the output tab and the file size that is made never changes. That doesn't sound right to me. Whether I make it 600 dpi or 4000 dpi the resulting file size is the same.

Does anyone have anysuggestions on where to look or what might me going on? I apprieciate any help.

Daniel

 

[Eggles]

Do you have any greyscale images in the document you are trying to convert to PDF? If so, V4 was known for a bug that prevented it from compressing greyscale TIFs very well. (Back in the days of v3/v4, I had files with lots of greyscale TIFs that would end up 10 times bigger PDFs with v4 compared to v3. Adobe released a patch but it's probably no longer available.)

However - if the PDFs she is getting from V5 don't look too impressive, have her look at the settings she is using. Until you are familiar with the way Distiller handles compression of all the different elements (text, graphics) then use one of the pre-set job options. In V5, there are four of these, and in order of increasing compression (thus smaller file size and lower quality), they are 'Press', 'Print', 'eBook' and 'Screen'. They are designed for different output options (as the names imply).

I have found that the 'eBook' setting (with compression of images to 150dpi) is fine for printing to an average desktop printer, esp inkjets. The 'Print' setting (300dpi images) is recommended for a high quality laser and 'Press' obviously for commercial offset output. You don't have to worry about fiddling with all the variables if you use one of these default settings. Make sure you embed fonts if the PDF could be opened/printed on a computer without the fonts in the original doc. These default setting are found under Distillers options. I am not familiar wiotjh making PDFs from Quark, but do you print to file first (i.e. choose Distiller as your printer and generate a postscript file), then launch Distiller, open the PS file and then distill? This is the safest way to ensure that the settings being used in Distiller are the ones YOU want to use.