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• • June 2, 2012 at 5:30 pm #62339
    RoManuV

    Member

    Hello, I would like to understand why this happens:

    I produced a book of 124 pages in french – 60MB. Then the same content in english – 50MB. And the same content, in arabic – 609 MB.

    If the 10MB difference between the FR and the EN versions didn't strike me, the 609MB of the AR version left me speechless. I used the exactly same content, there are 124 pages in the EN version, 124 pages in the FR version and 126 pages in the AR version. The three versions use the very same images, at identical sizes. The export from InDesign to PDF was done with exactly the same settings for all the three books.

    The first question is why?

    And the second one is: is the AR file too big to send it to the printer? Or should I split it into smaller PDFs, say one per chapter? What is the biggest acceptable file size for a printer?

  • June 3, 2012 at 3:16 am #62340
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    First thing if you are going to compare files is to export to IDML, open again, save as INDD and then compare their size. (But make sure you don't accindentally overwrite your originals! Sure, this ought to be quite safe, but You Never Know.)

    The reason for this fairly crucial step is that InDesign does not “overwrite” existing data when you edit a file; instead, changes get appended to the end, which is much faster and also has the benefit that if ID crashes on you, all previous editing is still there. And hard disk space is cheap. So it's possible your Frech file “contains” all English text as well, and the Arabic file contais both! And everything else you changed, by the way, such as images.

    Arabic characters, by the way, fall outside the regular 1-byte range for basic Latin-plus-some-accents — each aingle character will always use two bytes, so even if you have the exact same length of text, it'll take up twice the space. But I don't think that should account for the major difference you are seeing … No matter how much text you have, the number of bytes it uses is usually dwarfed by a single image. The saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words”, well, a thousand words is about 5, maybe 6 or 7 KB. A typical press quality image should be 100 times that size :)

    What is the biggest acceptable file size for a printer?

    You are talking about InDesign file sizes here, and as per rules outlined above, not everything that is “in” that file will end up in the final PDF. The inverse is also true: if you use linked graphic images, the final PDF could be much larger. You are sending PDFs to your printer, right?

    As for “biggest acceptable” … it depends on your printer. Smaller files can be send by mail, but we've had a Guide to Amsterdam, big book, heavy on full-page hq photo's, which ended up as a multi-gigabyte PDF that had to be sent to Hungary for printing. Solution: ask for FTP details, set up the transfer at the end of the day, and the following morning the file had gone off to the presses.

  • June 3, 2012 at 5:06 am #62341
    RoManuV

    Member

    Hello Jongware, thank you for your answer. As a matter of fact, the sizes I was quoting (FR – 60, EN – 50 and AR 609 MB) were those of the final high-resolution PDFs, and not those of the InDesign files. That is why I don't understand what it is happening…

    Furthermore, the french version was the first, the english one (smaller) was the second and the arabic one was the last.

    And for the second question, I send the files to the printer on CD, so I am not concerned about e-mail or FTP transfer. I was asking about the maximum acceptable file size from the printer's point of view, wondering if there was any limitation on his side, during the pre-press or the printing process.

  • June 3, 2012 at 10:50 am #62342
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Ah, those were PDF sizes? If you have Acrobat Pro, you can use “Audit Space Usage” and get a pretty comprehensive overview of where all those bytes go. Only thing is, it always seems to me much of InDesign's produced data goes into the “miscellaneous” section… At the least it will confirm or disprove that your total image plus text size are roughly equal.

    You don't have to worry about the capabilities of the poor system that's going to have to process your files. When I was in prepress, the computer that did the actual imaging needed double the amount of system memory than the computer I used to produce those files with! Prepress is memory- and speed-hungry, and the machines for it are typically the fastest commercially available and have internal and hard disk memory topped to the very OS limits.

    (There is a practical reason for this. Prepress imaging requires that a single entire “page” — which could be as large as a 4' x 5' printer sheet — is rendered at a resolution of about 3000 pixels per inch. Yes that's “three thousand“, not the familiar “300 dpi”! A single printed dot consists of thousands of invisibly small black or white “pixels” at that 3000 dpi. Calculate the total numbers, and you'll see that even your entire 600 MB file will fit snugly somewhere in a small corner in such a system.)

  • June 3, 2012 at 5:02 pm #62343
    RoManuV

    Member

    Wow, the “Audit Space Usage” function led me straight to the origin of the problem: I found out that I used, inadvertently, a wrong Export-to-PDF profile for the arabic file, a profile requiring no downsampling and no image compression. My bad, but on this occasion I discovered this useful tool in Acrobat Pro!

    Jongware, your intervention was, as usual, extremely helpful and informative, thank you deeply for your support. I would like very much to learn more about prepress, can you please suggest me some books I could use?

  • June 3, 2012 at 5:55 pm #62344
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    I would like very much to learn more about prepress, can you please suggest me some books I could use?

    A good background knowledge of prepress is always useful, and I would gladly recommend something to read — except that I know of no book or online document that you could start with! I learned my prepress “the hard way”, when computer-to-film was still in its infancy. (I fondly remember manually tinkering with PostScript files that failed to RIP properly to get 'em to work. I could probably write a book about that.)

    Maybe one of the other forum members has a good suggestion for you.

  • June 4, 2012 at 8:57 am #62345
    David Goodrich

    Participant

    I bought Claudia McCue's Real World Print Production on the strength of David Blatner's review. Much as he liked the book back in 2006, he noted that “this book does not get into many of the high-end concerns of printers and output providers”; and though many of the basics are pretty much the same there have been major changes as well. Amazon.com offers a “Look Inside”of the Kindle edition. On their website, the publisher (Peachpit) refers to the 2010 edition as “new” but still labels it “1st”.

    David

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