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• • September 12, 2012 at 2:32 pm #63147
    Bob Rubey

    Member

    I'm exporting v1.3 PDFs from CS6 on a Mac Pro. Nothing really unique about the job options, and I used the same settings a week or two ago on a book without a problem. Same Mac, same copy of InDesign.

    Now I have another book, and nearly every blank page, text-only page, and text/vector art page creates a 19.1 MB file. I'm using the PEU script to create single-page PDFs, but I've also tried a typical export.

    Using a higher version of PDF doesn't help, and I need to follow the printer's specs anyway.

    If I create a multi-page PDF and extract to single-page PDFs, the resulting PDFs are in a size range I would expect, KBs instead of MBs.

    I've also tried exporting to IDML, and opening in CS5 and CS6, but both apps stop responding after a while.

    What I have found, however, is a very long (almost 400 pp) text thread with a number of anchored objects I believe all to be vector.

    So, the question is, could the long text thread/anchored objects be causing the problem and is there a possible solution other than the multi-page PDF extraction workaround?

    Thanks, Bob

  • September 13, 2012 at 4:10 am #63153
    Bob Rubey

    Member

    I should also note that some of the blank pages had empty but threaded text frames. Dragging them to the pasteboard made no difference.

    And preflighting with Acrobat Pro did not reveal any unexpected elements.

    Bob

  • September 13, 2012 at 6:02 am #63154
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Weird. But I'm confused: You said that if you export the whole PDF (as a single pdf) with the same pdf preset, it's small? But if you export just one page, it's big?

    If you're having trouble exporting an IDML, then there's likely some (particularly bad) file corruption in there. You'll likely going to have to go through the file and one-by-one remove objects/frames/stories/images/whatever until you can get ID to export an IDML successfully.

  • September 13, 2012 at 7:03 am #63155
    Bob Rubey

    Member

    David,

    Time was an issue, so I used the multi-page PDF and extract technique using Bridge to rename the files. I've done this so many times that the PEU script would have been only marginally faster. The entire book totalled 382 PDFs @ 242.4 MB.

    Before I did so, I did one last test with the first 64 pp. As a multi-page PDF, 46.2 MB; as 64 individual PDFs using the PEU script and same job options, 1.25 GB.

    It seems as something is being “shared” (for the lack of a better term) in the multi-page PDF. The job is essentially complete, but I'd really like to know what's happening with this file.

    BTW, I had no problem exporting the IDML; it took less than 30 seconds. The problem was trying to open the resulting 14.3 MB file in either INDD CS5 or CS6.

    Bob

  • September 13, 2012 at 7:29 am #63156
    Bob Rubey

    Member

    I should say the PEU script would have been marginally faster if the resulting PDFs wouldn't have been so large.

    And I did get the IDML file I created this morning to open in both CS5 and CS6 (not sure why it was a problem yesterday), but there was no improvement regarding the the PDF export. The export from CS5 was very slightly larger.

  • September 14, 2012 at 1:50 pm #63167
    Bob Rubey

    Member

    With the help of one of David's old posts, https://creativepro.com/doc…..uuuuge.php, I'm learning the why, but I've yet to figure the what.

    Document overhead on one blank (19.2 MB) page was 99.84%. Using the Optimizer mentioned in the post brought it down to 53 KB, which is slightly larger than my 41 KB final PDF.

    For a handful of files, the method may be helpful to some, but with nearly 400, not so much.

    I tried cleaning up the INDD file even more than I already typically do as SOP, but with no improvement.

  • October 25, 2012 at 6:10 pm #63456
    Bob Rubey

    Member

    An update: A friend of mine who also has been a prepress tech for many years, and a sharp one at that, took a look at this job after I provided the necessary files. She came to the same conclusion that I eventually came to as well. Here is her response:

    Hey Bob–

    Just so you know, I got a chance to test your file yesterday with the same results as what you had. I tried changing the font on that page with no change in PDF size. Then I copied just the text from that page and pasted into a new 1 page Indy doc and made a pdf. It was 57k. So, I am guessing it is the anchored links causing the shift in file size when exported to a single page pdf. I'm guessing [InDesign] is “seeing” all the anchored links in the text chain as being on the same page and feels it has to include them, even though they are not actually visible. That's why the entire pdf is not abnormally large—that 19mb is already included in that file data and the other images are making up the additional size.

    I think you're out of luck!

  • November 2, 2012 at 7:36 pm #63492
    Bob Rubey

    Member

    Another update on this strangeness:

    Considering the aforementioned information, I used Dave Saunder's ReleaseAnyAnchor script throughout the document, and confirmed their elimination with Story Editor.

    With great hope I exported another page with only a vector logo to PDF, and again the resulting PDF was 19+ MB. [sigh]

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