Wonder if you all can answer a very specific question for me:
I am working at an agency which is doing a lot of outdoor advertising for its clients, and they often use photography. Traditionally I am used to using a prepress vendor to sort out the details, but that is not the case here and we are doing our own print production and prepress. I am being asked to provide a “hi res” pdf to a vendor to print a billboard, which is built in InDesign at 1/10 scale. In this case “hi res” means “it better look good when it prints.” The resolution of the raster image in the InDesign file is at 720dpi so that it will print at 72dpi at full size.
Conventional wisdom dictates that we do not want to export a PDF which has been downsampled to 300dpi or has any form of jpeg compression, since we want to retain the original 720 dpi of the file. That said, when we turn downsampling and compression off, the file size of the PDF becomes 600MB or more, which can be a little unweildy to hand off.
Is there ANY difference between exporting a PDF that has no downsampling and no compression vs one that also has no downsampling and uses ZIP compression? Is this simply the same as exporting a very large PDF and then zipping it? The PDF that uses ZIP compression is much smaller, I am leaning towards thinking it is okay to provide a PDF that does use ZIP compression, but we do not want to compromise image quality in these sorts of cases where we're doing gigantic outdoor billboards. Thanks
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