Expert: Tom Rouze - 1/6/2007

Question
I design adverts for a company., and recently i have designed an advert (using illustrator CS2) which should not be large in file size but it is.  It involves 4 JPEG images inside it, and they are about 1 mb or less in file size, but when i put them in illustrator with some text, and save the whole document as a PDF it becomes 177 mb.  I have tried exporting the file as a JPEG but this seriously degrades the quality of text aswell as images. I have tried compressing it in ACROBAT, though this only reduces it to 88 mb.  I don't understand why the images that are only 1mb or less are causing such a large file size.  I saw an answer on tgis site that just briefly suggested mixing illustrator and JPEG together in InDesign (which i have)and is it possible, and if it could be described how?

Many thanks

Matthew Edwards

Answer
Matthew,
I'm not familiar enough with InDesign to answer give you specifics, but it is a page layout program so basically what you're doing to keep the file size down is linking the images instead of imbedding them.
If the images aren't cropped to the correct size and you're manipulating the size in Illustrator that will sometimes increase the size.
Sorry I couldn't be more help.
Thank you,

Tom