Hi.
I’ve been trying to save my portfolio as a PDF file but can’t seem to get a good size/quality relation.
Anyone has any suggestions for exporting settings in Illustrator/Indesign?
Thank you!
Carlos T
Hey Carlos,
You can open the pdf that you created in Acrobat and edit the file size by going Document->File Size, then change the compatibility, normally its set for Acrobat 5.0, but you can pretty safely say that you can get away by setting it to Acrobat 7.0 or 8.0, which will greatly reduce the file size, and you can still get away with doing 240Dpi on the images, but you can play around with it.
Hope this helps
Hamish
Open in Acrobat > Document > Reduce file size
If you are exporting out of Indesign there are a lot of pre-sets you can use.
File > Adobe PDF Presets > Smallest file size
should do it. You can also edit any of the presets to adjust quality/size.
Out of Illustrator, if possible, best to print to a .PS file and run that through Acrobat Distiller where you can control all the different levels of conversion and sampling. Straight “save as PDF” from Illustrator tends to make giant files. Reduce file size in Acrobat helps, but not that much and you don’t have too much control, though I think there might be a settings panel someplace if you have the full version. If just the reader, probably not.
R
Also check out a previous topic on this: best settings to create small but quality PDFs
Thank you!
Very good answers.
I’ll sometimes “print” a PDF. Just select print from the drop-down as usual, and then instead of choosing your printer, you can select “Adobe 8.0” or whatever version. I find that it usually has the smallest file size and most of the time I can’t notice any reduced image quality.
Remember you can get away with 72dpi it it’s to be viewed on-screen.
There is also the PDF optimizer tool in acrobat pro.