How to reduce PDF export size of Indesign documents?

YOu cannot change the page size when exporting  PDF.  Do you have a full version of Acrobat? If so, try using the optimizer. You can run a space usage audit first to see what's using most of the space.

At a certain point, there is a fundamental disconnect between the concept of a graphically-rich document and wanting it to be miniscule in size. You can't have your cake and eat it too, so to speak. If by mucking with the compression and resolution settings, you've got it down to 8MB from 58MB, you've done quite well. 8MB is not that big for e-mailing of a graphically rich document. At 72dpi, your raster graphics may already be highly degraded depending upon the original content and the magnification at which the content will be viewed. If some of your graphics are vector based, the resolution and compression are irrelevant. You could conceivably make low resolution raster images out of such graphics at the cost of quality.

          - Dov

If you want 3mb with that many pages that is image intense about the only way to do it is to save out the whole layout at jpeg2000 and build the pdf from that. It will be plenty crunchy on type, but hit your size threshold. Assuming you have Acrobat you could index the document, make it searchable and replace the raster pages to get the benefit of a searchable document.

That will also make it incompatible with Mac OS X's preview and about anything that isn't Acrobat.

Alternately you could rebuild the layout and make flat backgrounds with type on the front of them, but you are still gonna get crunchy images on zoom.

Why not just host it somewhere like google docs or something comparable? Emailing pdfs all over the place just bloats email servers.

I agree about the disconnect between quality and size on graphically heavy docs. May be a case of pushing clients towards swf clients if size is that crucial to final art delivery.

I'm doing a pitch deck for a client. He prints x number to take to his pitches and he emails PDFs to others. Constantly complaining about 4.3MB PDFs on a 31 page documents with dozens of photos and logos and a custom built AI map that is 4.3MB by itself. You can only optimize so much without defeating the purpose of a document that relies on so many images to sell itself.

I assume you are running on Mac OS X?

If so this can be done no problem. The trick is to go through the Print dialog.

Go there, then change your page size and scale settings to the reduced size you want.

Then click the Printer button at the bottom.

In the bottom left click the PDF button with the down arrow, choose Save as Postscript...

Give the file a name and save it to your desktop, then run that file through Acrobat Distiller.

And in the process you'll wind up with a flattened PDF. If you're sending to a client for proofing be prepared to explain that those ugly white lines all over the place won't print like that. And when they print it on their desktop printer and some of the lines do print, you're going to have a real credibility problem on your hands.

Just a warning.

Bob