Reducing the Size of your Windows PDF files

If you use large images within your project, you can limit your PDF file size by adjusting the PDF Option settings.

From either the Publisher Document Options … button, or from the File > Save As > PDF Document Options … button, choose the PDF Options … button at the bottom left.

Within here you can limit the image resolution – dpi of your images (300 or 150 should see a noticeable file size reduction)

And/Or you can choose to Compress all images – this changes your images to compressed jpegs, from tiff or whatever you imported.

We tested this in-house, and within a new blank project added a single 7.5MB jpg image.  With no changes to the PDF Options, the saved PDF was 955KB.  Using the Compress file option changed nothing as the imported file was a compressed Jpeg to start with, however limiting the resolution to 300 dpi reduced the file size to 190KB, and setting this to 150dpi further reduced the file size to 75KB.

In a second test we added a 64mb tif image.  With no changes to the PDF Options the saved PDF was 16MB, turning on the Compress File option resulted in a 989KB file.  Just using Limit Resolution set to 300dpi = 227KB, further limiting to 150dpi = 77KB.  Even more reductions can be made using both Compress File and Limit Resolution options.