is there a way to reduce file size of a pdf?

[judycollins]

I write a monthly newsletter for my ski club. The output is an 8 page document (w/ text and pictures). About half the members pay for paper verions, and the other half download off the web.

With ski season coming up this month has a lot more files, and my end result pdf is 3.5 MB (too large for downloading according to our webmaster). I don't know how it got so large, because I decreased the resolution of all the jpg files in Photoshop before importing them. The final file size is twice the size of the sum of it's parts.

I import and print the pdf from Word (could be the problem in itself), because the club does not want to part with the cash for In Design (don't know if that would help with the size problem anyway).

Is there any way to get acrobat to shrink the file size? Or is there a tool better that will do the job? Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Judy

The document (at least last months) that I'm talking about can be found on

http://www.hobokenskiclub.com.

Last month was 1.5 MB.

 

[Foamcow]

You say you reduced the resolution of the images, but to what?
And what is the target medium? Screen, laser/inkjet printer?

Distiller will reduce file size by compressing/re-resing images based on the job options you have selected at the time of Distilling.
The standard Job Options (Screen, Print, Press) provide settings that should help.
Are you using these already?
If so, try playing about with the job options and see if you can save any more space.

You could also try exporting your PDF from Acrobat as a PostScript file and re-distilling it. This *sometimes* reduces the file size slightly, though I doubt you will get much out of this method.

 

[Eggles]

An 8 page document with text and colour pics should compress to quite a bit smaller than 3.5MB. As the previous poster suggested, if you are using Distiller 5, you should be chooosing the job option called 'Screen' to get the smallest file size possible. This downsamples all images to 72 dpi which is suitable for web display. It doesn't look too pretty printed though.

You could also try the 'eBook' setting under job options, as this downsamples images to 150 dpi, which can look acceptable printed, though will be a slightly larger file size.

I am assuming when you make this PDF from Word, you are choosing Distiller as your printer and 'printing to file' which will generate a PRN file, and then opening this file in Distiller, choosing the 'Screen' setting under job options and then creating the PDF?

 

[horqua]

Judy,
Follow this thread and see if it helps: thread223-657209

Knock and the door shall be opened unto you. Seek and ye shall find!

I love Mondays cause they're the Second day of the week!

 

[kmc1]

Here are the Acrobat 5 Distiller settings that have worked well for me. I use them for a newsletter that includes color images, a 6 page newsletter with color images is approximately 500 kb

I offer a little bit better resoluton than the "screen" distiller setting in case some of the users viewing the document want to print the newsletter themselves. The Photos are less pixellated with these settings.

It's been a while since I've tinkered with this, they probably could be improved upon, or others may have ideas on these settings.

The settings work with Acrobat 6, too.

General
Compatiblity 3.0
Check the "Optimize for Fast Web View" box
Resolution: 1200 dpi

Compression
Color Images:
Check "Bicubic Downsampling to" "170 to 255 dpi"
Check Compression "JPEG", Quality "Minimum"

Grayscale Images
Check "Bicubic Downsampling to" "170 to 255 dpi"
Check Compression "JPEG", Quality "Minimum"

Monochrome Images
Check "Bicubic Downsampling to" "170 to 255 dpi"
Check Compression "CCITT Group 4"
Check "Compress Text and Line Art"

Fonts
Check "Embed All Fonts"
Check "Subset embedded fonts when percent of characters used is less than "100%"

Color
"Convert Everything For Color Management"
Intent "Default"

Working Spaces
Gray "None"
RGB "sRGB IEC61966-2.1"
CMYK U.S. Web Coated {SWOP} ver 2

Device Dependent Data
Check "Preserve Overprint Settings"
Check "Preserve Under Color Removal and Black Generation Settings"
"Preserve" Transfer Functions

Advanced
Options
Check "Allow Postscript file to Override Job Options"
Check "Preserve Level 2 copypage Semantics"
Check "Illustrator Overprint Mode"
Check "Convert Gradients to Smooth Shades"

Document Structuring Conventions (DSC)
Check "Process DSC Comments"
Check "Resize Page and Center Artwork for EPS files"
Check "Preserve Document Information from DSC"

 

[AlexNeil]

We edit PDF documents themselves, and I've found that successive "saves" will increase the filesize - so I presume that Acrobat is saving some sort of history or undo list. By choosing the "save as" command (and then overwriting the existing file) then the file size decreases by quite a lot.

Not sure if this helps in this particular scenario though - it depends on whether you perform any edits in the actual PDF document.


Alex

 

[user2]

Thanks fro all those posts.
Where do I go to find distiller?

 

[MarcusStringer]

It comes with the "full verson" of Adobe Acrobat

Marcus

http://www.midlandtypesetters.com.au