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monta17

macrumors member
Original poster
May 7, 2009
67
0
Michigan
Can someone tell me the best settings to use, or how to optimize pdfs for a website. I am creating some of the pdfs from InDesign and some from Photoshop. Some of the results are very large pdfs.

In InDesign, if I choose "smallest size" the text is blurry. But using a "standard" or "high quality" the file size is very large. I've tried going into the pdf optimizer under Advanced, but it seems if I downsample much I'm still getting the blurry business. These are usually multiple page documents with images.

I've also seen some one page documents that are VERY small in file size and VERY clear. I can't even duplicate those as well. I just wonder how these are being created.

Thanks.
 
The text should never be blurry if you set your type in InDesign. It will render as vector. You can probably punch in some middle of the road downsampling settings (like 150 ppi) and see what you get for the image quality vs file size. The web is 72, and other print settings will be 300+.
 
If you have Acrobat, you'll want to make use of that. Save in a high quality PDF open it in acrobat and use the reduce filesize command to slim the file up. One other option would be to open the file, and then print->save as PDF. I find this can reduce the filesize some, but not as well as Acrobat. Using the two techniques combined, I was able to squish a 12mb to something like 20k (it was only text). I've seen much larger savings too (40mb-4 or 5).

Take a look at these Macosxhints posts:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060509032104805&query=compress+pdf
and
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20100111142051154&query=compress+pdf
 
If you have Acrobat, you'll want to make use of that. Save in a high quality PDF open it in acrobat and use the reduce filesize command to slim the file up. One other option would be to open the file, and then print->save as PDF. I find this can reduce the filesize some, but not as well as Acrobat. Using the two techniques combined, I was able to squish a 12mb to something like 20k (it was only text). I've seen much larger savings too (40mb-4 or 5).

The OP already has InDesign, so they should have much greater control of quality and file size through the built in distiller than through either of these methods.
 
That may be true, but if the OP is unable to get the results desired from InDesign, then they may want to try some other apps to see if they can get the desired result.
 
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