Creating smaller PDFs from a vector-dense book

My friend Sharon Steuer is the author of the Illustrator Wow book. She has a problem with the PDFs she creates for proofing the pages. I’m posting this problem here hoping that someone has a good idea of what to do to help her.

Problem: Since she is doing a book on Illustrator, the pages contain many vector-based illustrations. In the old days, when she used Quark, she could create a PDF that used the low-resolution preview of the EPS art.

But moving over to InDesign, there is no low-resolution preview in InDesign’s Export to PDF feature. So, no matter what she sets for the compression settings, the vector-based artwork comes in as very heavy PDF files that take forever to draw on screen.

I told her a while ago to try printing to PDF and use the Proxy setting, but that was too rough a setting.

I’m opening this up for anyone. What ideas would you suggest to create smaller PDFs with a better quality preview of the vector art?

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This article was last modified on December 18, 2021

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