Smaller PDF files?

["Geoff Hart" <geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca>]

Christeen Cox asked for help compressing a pdf file: <<Two 
of our manuals are currently around the 6 - 9 Mb file size 
which a few of our customers feel is too large.>>

There are some obvious questions to ask: First, have you 
optimized your graphics for their intended destination? If the 
PDF will be used only online, you can get away with much 
lower graphical resolutions and color depths; if they'll be 
printed, you might still be using too many colors or a higher 
resolution than your customers can benefit from on their 
office printers. Second, have you embedded fonts? If you've 
used several complex fonts, that can really bulk up a PDF. 
Solutions include using the built-in Acrobat fonts rather than 
the specific Postscript fonts you used to create the job (often a 
very satisfactory solution for body text and headings) and 
embedding only subsets of the fonts (e.g., if you use only 10 
letters of a custom font to reproduce a logo). In the latter case, 
you might even benefit from including the logo as a graphic 
rather than embedding the entire font.

If the customers are complaining because the files download 
too slowly, you have additional options. First, you might be 
able to persuade your service provider to support "page at a 
time" (something like that) downloading, a new feature that 
Acrobat supports, so they can start reading one page while 
they wait for the rest of a large document to download. 
Second, you could split one large file into several smaller 
files (e.g., one per chapter). Third, you could try compressing 
the file with WinZip or Stuffit; that doesn't usually work very 
well, but it's remotely possible you might end up with a 
slightly smaller file.

--Geoff Hart @8^{)}  geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca  (Pointe-Claire, Quebec)
"If you can't explain it to an 8-year-old, you don't understand it"--Albert Einstein