From the course: InDesign Secrets
136 Quick tips for making a small PDF file size - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
136 Quick tips for making a small PDF file size
I love PDF. I'm just a total PDF fan boy. But here is one of my pet peeves. Some times PDFs are just done too big. For example, have ever exported a one page PDF, and you get like a 500K file. What the heck? I mean that's not huge, but it's annoying because you know that it should only be like 150K. And if you're emailing it to someone, or putting it on a website for a 1,000 people to download, that could make a big difference. So why are PDFs sometimes much larger than they need to be? Well, let me show you a few things to pay attention to when you're exporting a PDF. I'm going to go to the file menu and choose export. The first thing you need to do is, decide whether you're going to use the PDF interactive or the PDF print. If your document has buttons or movies or sounds or that kind of thing, then you can go ahead and use interactive. But for virtually all other PDFs, you're going to want to use print. Stuff you're going to send to a client to proof. Or things you're putting on our website for somebody to download and print. Adobe PDF print is the better option. Now the first mistake that a lot of InDesign users make is to choose one of the PDF x presets. These are great for sending to a printer, but they're not so good at making a really small PDF that you'll email to somebody or put up on website. The second mistake that a lot of InDesign users make, is to jump right down to the smallest file size preset. Smallest file size sounds great, but it usually degrades your PDF too much. It becomes not really useful at all. Images get really icky, and even some text can have problems. That said, smallest file size is a good starting point. So, I usually start there and then make some changes myself. For example, one change that I almost always make is to turn on create tagged PDF. This option is necessary if you want anybody with a visual disability to read your PDF. But it's also important, if you want people to be able to export the text or even just copy and paste text out of your PDF, which is really helpful for a lot of people. So I like having that on. I also turn on bookmarks and hyperlinks. This way, if I do have any bookmarks and hyperlinks in my document, they're exported, and it doesn't add hardly any space to your file size, so I leave that turned on. Next, I head over to the compression pane of this dialogue box, and I can see that the compression, is just too low. In fact, it's set to low, image quality low. No wonder the images look so terrible. So, I'm going to set this to medium. Medium is much better. And I'm going to set this both for gray scale and color images. You might want to set it higher, to high or maximum, but honestly, if you're trying to put a PDF on a website for somebody else to print, medium is typically all you really need. The other problem here, is that color images are down sampled far too much. 100 pixels per inch, that is too low. I'm going to increase this to 150 pixels, and I'll make sure that this is set to 150 as well. At 100 pixels or below, your images just get all pixellated and crunchy, so you don't want that. 150 pixels per inch is not only a better resolution, but allows your viewer to zoom in to 200% and still get an adequate representation of an image. I'm going to jump over here to the output pain, and I want to point out one other thing that you might want to change. One of the biggest differences between a really large PDF, and a tiny PDF, is whether or not your profiles are included. And I don't want to get too technical here, but it all has to do with this color area inside this dialogue box. If you have any CMYK images in your document, or if you're using convert to destination, or convert to destination preserve numbers, and you choose a CMYK destination. Well, your document is going to to be much larger, it's larger because CMYK is larger than RGB. But it's also larger because, the destination profile, the CMYK profile tends to add 400 or 500k to the size of your PDF. If you're sending a document to a printer, well, maybe you need that, but if you're just putting something on a website, and you want to keep it small, you absolutely do not need that. So I'm going to leave this set to either No Color Conversion, or Convert to Destination and then set destination to an RGB output space. The most typical one you'd want to use is SRGB, this way all your C,Y and K colors are going to be converted to RGB, they'll get brighter, more dynamic, it'll look much better when the person opens it up. Now I don't mind including the destination profile for an RGB, PDF. Because RGB profiles are really tiny, it only adds maybe one or two k. It's the CMYK profiles that are really huge. Anyway, that's pretty technical, but it's really important that you know CMYK big RGB small. Finally the last thing I'm going to do, is head back to the general pane and turn on view PDF after exporting. Just so that I can see my PDF after it exports it. I like that. Now, I don't want to have to make these changes every time I export a PDF, so I'd better say this is a preset. I'll click the Save Preset button, and then I'm going to name my preset and I'm going to call it Pretty Small PDF. Click OK. And now that shows up in my PDF preset pop-up menu here and I'll be able to use it from now on. I'll click Export, and InDesign will warn me that the document transparency blend space does not match the destination color space. Once again it has to do with that CMYK versus RGB. I'm going to be pushing all of my CMYK colors, like the images and color swatches into RGB, and InDesign is warning me that that's going to happen. So I'm saying, that's fine, it's okay. I'll click OK, InDesign exports the PDF and opens it in Acrobat. I'll click the Fit Page in Window button here, and we can see that the image looks really good, bright, and still very small. In fact, let's switch to the desktop and I'll show you that this document is only 130k. I happen to know that this same flyer, if I export it as a PDF X1A, it would be over a megabyte. So by making a few little tweaks, we cut the size of this thing by 90%. Now clearly, this is all about finding the right balance between usability and file size. The more use you want out of it, the bigger the file size. If you want something, that you can print on a commercial printing press, it's going to be bigger. But, if you're just putting a flier or a form on a website, then using these tricks to cut down the size is just the ticket.
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Contents
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229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
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230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
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231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
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232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
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233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
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112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
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113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
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114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
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115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
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107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
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108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
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109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
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110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
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048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
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049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
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050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
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028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
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029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
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030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
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031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
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032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
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007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
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008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
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009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
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010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
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