4 Replies Latest reply: Aug 9, 2010 12:00 AM by Stix Hart RSS

    ID CS4 – massive difference in PDF size (Document Overhead)

    myDwayneSmith Community Member

      Hi all,

       

      I'm getting massively different results exporting the same spread from the same document using the same PDF export preset. The first export was a couple of weeks ago, the second export is today (after some colour correction to images).

       

      For some reason the document overhead has blown out and what was a 9MB file is now coming out as over 100MB.

       

      It appears to affect this one ID file — problem is not replicated with a couple of other files I've tested — But it IS replicated with other spreads from this one ID file.

       

      What could have changed in this document to create such disparate results?

      Picture 1.pngPicture 2.png

       

      Many thanks for any help

       

      d.

        • 1. Re: ID CS4 – massive difference in PDF size (Document Overhead)
          myDwayneSmith Community Member

          Further to this....

           

          If I use PDF Optimizer and run only Discard document information and metadata — this brings the file size down to an appropriate level (it also discards important prepress data, nice).

           

          If I copy the entire contents of the ID file into a fresh document — things work correctly again (luckily I've got a script which does this nicely)

           

          So, I can only assume that the ID file has somehow become corrupted (even though it seems to work fine in all other respects).

           

          Any other explanations for this behaviour?

           

           

          d.

          • 2. Re: ID CS4 – massive difference in PDF size (Document Overhead)
            Stix Hart Community Member

            myDwayneSmith wrote:

             

            So, I can only assume that the ID file has somehow become corrupted (even though it seems to work fine in all other respects).


             

            Probably right, have you tried exporting to idml, opening that again and exporting from there?

            • 3. Re: ID CS4 – massive difference in PDF size (Document Overhead)
              myDwayneSmith Community Member

              Thanks Stix

               

              Unfortunately, this is a reprint of a book created a few years ago (when workflow practices at this place lacked a little foresight) and I'm only tracking down links for the pages that need to be resupplied to the printer (because of text edits, etc). So, inx and idml are not helpful as the previews are lost for any images with broken links — hence the need to copy across every spread into a fresh document.

               

              Interestingly, I DID try an inx export so that I could at least get the spreads out that I need for the printer. The resulting PDFs were just as huge. I then tried an idml export. Two of the three PDFs exported correctly after this conversion, but one of them was still just as huge. Just for kicks, I tried the idml export a second time — this time all three PDFs were huge again. Very weird stuff.

               

              But, with the time it takes to export and open an inx or idml file — it was actually quicker just to create a fresh file and copy everything across.

              • 4. Re: ID CS4 – massive difference in PDF size (Document Overhead)
                Stix Hart Community Member

                That is very weird indeed, because an inx or idml export should clean up a document if anything does.  The other thing to try of course is binary separation, i.e. split the document in half and try each half, and try to narrow it down to a particular element, but if it's not happening every time that makes this difficult.