What the...?! Buttons in large interactive PDF make up 25mb of a 28mb PDF?!

if you own Acrobat Pro use File - Save as - Optimised PDF. Click Audit Space Usage. What does it report? Still, I'd expect a lot of pain from 9000+ form fields.

Just to add on to what Test Screen name points out... 27 MB for a 240 page PDF with 97% comprised of form fields/interactive elements is not exactly terrible.

I have made Gb PDF's before when I started out - that had far fewer pages or anything else for that matter.

You could, however, try opening the PDF in Acrobat then click File> Save as Other...> Reduced Size PDF...

and see if that takes any further "weight" out of the file size.

Although now I read my post the last bit is fairly similar to Test Screen Name anyway...

I don't know if I should delete my comment.

Nothing wrong with your comment and I would +1 it.

It's no secret that I've become less and less of a fan of interactive PDF for many things that people try to use it for. Without more detail on this project, I'll withhold judgement.

>As you'll see there's also a fair chunk in Acrobat forms - although only using interactive buttons and not any form field etc. Why is that also bloated?

Acrobat sees a button as a type of form field.

If they have unique identifiers then clearly each one must be a separate object. These are much more heavyweight than links - you have far too many form fields for stability I'd say.

Have you tried just making the Navigation directly in Acrobat where the hyperlinks go to the required PDF page?

It's not just the 5 megs that stands out to me, the 11 megs for the embedded fonts seems a bit over the top.

Acrobat buttons generally take up less file space than those created in InDesign. It's just the way it is.

On the web? Why would you want to use this in a browser?

Interactive PDF in anything other than Acrobat/Reader is not likely to function properly.

Further to what Bob's saying, most people leave the default browser reader set to as installed. Which means Chrome uses its own, FF uses its own, etc.

In my somewhat limited experience for interactive PDFs for the world at large such as you may be making (I have made them for interwebs wherein the PDF reader is set in stone), many/most of those readers do not handle interactive PDFs well. Now, for something as simple as page navigation they may well work, though.

They (interactive PDFs) rarely (if ever) work on a mobile device. Do test in a variety of browsers where the browser uses its built-in reader.

While exporting to Interative PDF choose Compression and change the JPEG Quality and put Resolution (ppi) upto your satisfaction. It will helps you to reduce size. see the screenshot

Hope it works.

Thanks

This can be helpful - but it won't affect the size of embedded fonts. On that subject, I'm guessing InDesign is including multiple copies of the fonts. So why not abandon the fonts? I guess these are not actually fillable fields. So set up the navigation text as regular InDesign text. Then overlay text-free form fields over them for the actions.

On reflection, scratch that. If all you want is links, use hyperlinks. Form fields are using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Learn how to create, manage, and edit hyperlinks in InDesign  ("Create a hyperlink to a page").