PDF sizes in Illustrator and Photoshop?

imacken,

You may Save As PDF with Preserve Illustrator editing capabilities unticked. IMMEDIATELY CLOSE THE DOCUMENT WITHOUT SAVING, TO AVOID DELETING YOUR LIVE NON PDF CONTENTS.

Or you may Print to PDF (Acrobat Distiller). Especially keep an eye on the PostScript Level (set it to the highest available), and set the Acrobat Distiller>Properties>Adobe PDF Settings as needed (you may edit the ones shown).

And are you aware that converting the pdf in Photoshop loses the vector-data and searchable texts and the resulting pdf is basically no better than a simple jpg (or tiff depending on the compression settings)?

If you open your PDF in Acrobat and optimize it, you can usually reduce the size. The settings can be adjusted to suit your needs, and the PDF can still be edited in Illustrator.

imacken,

Yes, I am aware I lose all vector data, etc. and that is what I want to do.

Often, changing from vector to raster (as in rasterizing) will result in (sometimes greatly) increased fil size.

and I tend to flatten them for sending to publishers as adverts.

I work pre-press and the idea of rasterizing any vector content before sending it to be printed seems fairly unfortunate to me.

And like I stated earlier a pdf converted in psd is no better than a jpg or tif, it does not even retain the trimbox- and bleedbox-information.

I share in Jacob’s suspicion (post 1) that »Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities« may be a significant influence on the pdf’s file size for you – have you checked that out? 

imacken,

Yes, I always have the 'preserve Illustrator editing capabilities' unchecked. Makes very little difference to the file size.

So have I, and it is true that the differnce is often insignificant.

But have you tried the Print to PDF option? That is normally quite efficient.

imacken,

File>Print (or Ctrl/Cmd+P), then select Acrobat Distiller (or whatever they call it in your version) in the printer dropdown list if needed (I have it as the default printer for all applications).

imacken,

Do you (not) have Acrobat?

I don't get notifications of replies from this forum

Have you ticked Yes in the relevant Your stuff>Your Preferences>Email Notification Preferences box, such as Automatically receive notifications for all discussions I create?

If you have and it fails to work, you should Start a discussion in the Forum Comments Forum, and hope that John will see it soon.

http://forums.adobe.com/community/general/forum_comments?view=discussions

When I took a class online we were asked to save our artwork as ‘smallest file size’ and make sure the editing capabilities checkbox was not checked. When saving PDF’s this way on Illustrator my files have always turned out very small. It does lower the quality of the image but if you need to upload the file on a site, download, email, etc, these settings have always worked best for me.

You may Save As PDF with Preserve Illustrator editing capabilities unticked. IMMEDIATELY CLOSE THE DOCUMENT WITHOUT SAVING, TO AVOID DELETING YOUR LIVE NON PDF CONTENTS.

I find it better to use File > Save a Copy, rather than Save As if you're worried about this.

When I save out a PDF, I always use Save a Copy - it outputs a completely independant file and doesn't affect the one you have open.

Mathias,

It is true that Save a copy is safer, but it changes the name to include copy, at least in 10.

imacken,

When you have Acrobat, it should be possible to use its printer (driver). I believe it is called Adobe PDF or PDF Printer in newer versions, and it should have settings to meet different demands.

By the way, I was thinking of the second of the two Johns that have replies to the Forum Comments forum thread, John Cornicello who often posts under the Adobe Admin name; the first John is very helpful and vigilant, too. I had never seen the thread he referred to until I saw his link because it was hidden in another forum.

Sure, but simple enough to change the filename in the dialogue, which you'd probably want to do anyway. I normally need to anyway, since usually saving out a proof PDF or something.

Now this is strange, imacken.

I wonder whether there is something that should be done to install/enable it during installation of Acrobat.

There must be something you can do now to install the printer (driver). Have you looked into the subject in the Helpfiles?

Mathias,

I see your point. Except for very rare cases, I prefer to have the same  PDF and AI name.

You might want to try opening the PDF you save out of Illustrator in Acrobat instead of Photoshop and running it through the Preflight engine. Menu>Advanced>Print Production>Preflight. Try using the Online Publishing (optimized for size) setting. This will down sample the raster data and keep the vector data in the file. You can also save your own presets based on the existing presets if you want to balance quality and file size to taste.

If you are on 10.6.x or 10.7.x then it requires a lot of fumbling around to get the PDF printer reestablished on a Mac. Probably not worth the trouble.