Making PDF files smaller
HBYardSale
I am faced with another elementary (I'm sure) issue and here's my story. Pull
up a chair...
I am doing a 16-page newsletter which is printed and mailed out each month.
Because of the detail in the graphics, I generally save the PS/PDF files at
1200 dpi. Last time, the PMD file was in the 200MB range. Print quality is
always excellent -- no complaints here.
I would like to create a 2nd PDF file for sending by email but need to keep the
size below 3MB to keep the download time reasonable for dialup folks.
I'm wondering if there's anything else I can do to minimize the file size. I'm
not really too worried about graphics resolution because they can look at the
printed newsletter to see the high quality photos. The PDF file is mainly for
the text info -- meeting times, etc.
Here's what I have tried so far... and to minimize the conversion time for this
test, I'm only using a 2-page newsletter.
The PMD file is 42MB and contains the following photos (color):
- 4 TIF files (1MB each)
- 1 PDF (500K)
- 1 PDF file (1.5MB)
Within Pagemaker, I "print" to Distiller and set the PS resolution to 1200.
This results in a PS file of 10MB. Then when I used Distiller to create the PDF
file, I set the resolution to 200 dpi and the resulting PDF file is 2MB.
(Extrapolating to 16 pages, this puts the 16-page document in the 15-20MB
range.)
Then, I tried lowering the resolution, trying to get smaller files.
I changed the PS resolution to 144, leaving the PDF set to 200, but the
resulting PS and PDF files are only about 5% smaller. Not that much better.
I'm sure there's something I'm missing -- 2MB seems like a pretty large file
for 2 pages. A few months ago, I converted a whole 16-pg newsletter with the
same amount of graphic files to PDF and the whole thing was only 2.5MB.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!