Expert: Amy - 10/1/2009

Question
QUESTION: Hi Amy,

I recently created a newsletter with lots of photos and illustrations. The newsletter is for e-mail distribution. The size of the pdf file is more than 17,000k...can I reduce the size of this file to a more manageable size and how can I do this?

Thank you

Nancy

ANSWER: Hi Nancy.

I'm assuming you used Illustrator to create the newsletter but you didn't say which version, so I'm going to make assumptions and give you an answer for CS3 that you may have to tweak depending on your specific version.

All you need to do is select the "Smallest Fize Size" PDF preset after choosing Save As PDF and you should get a much smaller result. That will give you something really compressed and really small and therefore it may have a poor image quality. You can make some modifications to the preset after you choose it to find the right balance between quality and size.

Choose Save as PDF
Name the file and click Save
Choose "Smallest File Size" from the preset drop down menu on top.
Click on Compression in the left-hand menu.
Change the Color Bitmap settings section to Bicubic Downsampling to 200 for images over 250 and image quality of maybe Medium. You can try High. Low is usually too low.

If your newsletter contains grayscale artwork, do the same in the grayscale section.

Then continue with the save. Let me know if this works for you.
-A



---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Hi Amy,

Thank you for responding so quickly. I apolgize for not being as clear with my question. I am using an older version of Illustrator...9. Hopefully I will be able to upgrade soon but for now this is it. Are there any options here.

Again, thank you.

Nancy

Answer
Hi again,

Well you can still get a smaller file out of 9...

After you choose Save as PDF, you get a window with an "options set" drop down menu that should have a "screen optimized" selection. This option will produce just about the smallest file you can get that still has recognizable images. I'm guessing you won't like the choppy jpeg results so after selecting "screen optimized", switch from General to Compression in the other drop down menu. Change the 72 dpi to something more like 144 and change the Quality to High. If this produces a large file, go back to Medium.

Now I should mention that if you have terribly complicated vector graphics in there, you should physically reduce the complexity by combining paths, eliminating "unseen" or unnecessary elements, etc. Reducing the number of fonts whenever possible also helps. For example, if you've got one word set in a large display font, sometimes it's best to convert that word to outlines so that Acrobat doesn't embed the font. Even a subset of a font can take up more disk space than a few paths.

If you've got any further questions, let me know!
-A