Geek Help, Please: Adobe Acrobat/Reader Problem

Er - forgot to add that, of course, I'd be glad to do this myself, if someone can point me toward the software that I need and the basic process required. LCD

From the looks of it, yr images are far too large. Are you embedding them as TIFFs? Reduce to JPEG first, medium quality, and you can probably cut down the size of the PDF by a factor of 10-20.

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It's not PDF that's at issue. It's the graphics, which can be tweaked with any common raster editor.

Do you have access to the original files? You don't need to mess with the individual photos, the resolution and compression is decided when the PDF is created. Generally that's done through Acrobat Distiller - or even a PDF server, however Quark and InDesign can both output PDFs without Acrobat being on the machine, and both give you all the options you'll need for specifying the degree of jpg compression for the images.

I'd be able to do this for you but unfortunately my copy of Acrobat is corrupted somehow. I have to fix it. But if you did have Acrobat, you wouldn't have to tweak the graphics, Distiller will cut the images to the border used in the layout, lower the resolution to whatever is required (I try to keep it at least at 150dpi for decent quality) and whatever level jpg compression you want.

A slightly optimized version. Just under 10M.

Thank you all for your comments and suggestions and for taking the time to share your knowledge. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the original files, just the finished .pdf's. The images were/are too large - the new editor insists on the highest res. versions available.

Libcrypt - thank you ever so much for optimizing the files (er, what does optimizing mean, in this instance?) - I just downloaded your version and it looks marvelous (and significantly more manageable). I can now send the file to my printer without my computer crashing *grinning*.

I fed the PDFs into Acrobat and asked it to do the default print optimization. In this case, the main benefit is that it reduced the images to 150dpi when they were above that. You could get it smaller by hand-tweaking the images, but if you don't have the originals, it'd be more trouble than it's worth.

Does Acrobat Reader have the "Reduce File Size" function, or is that only in the pro version?

Adobe Viewer doesn't let you do a whole helluva lot, Rock. Lucky that it allows text-selection.

I redid the optimization at 300dpi with "high" JPEG quality, and the result is 12.2MB, in case the prior one isn't acceptable for print. (Most commercial printing is done at 300dpi, and screen resolution is usually under 100dpi, so there's usually no point in using a higher number for a print-ready document.)

I gave this a shot using the "Reduce File Size" function, but could only get it down to around 12 MB. :/

150 is usually good enough for something people are just gonna print on their own printers to read. Commercial printing requires 300 dpi (actually 266 dpi as it needs to be twice the linescreen, which is generally 133 lpi). However there are other pre-press issues with creating a PDF to send to a real printer and you generally want somebody who knows what they are doing. In the end you usually end up with whats called a PDF X1a which is a high-resolution standard for off-set printing. But there can be issues ranging from making sure your images are all CMYK, to dealing with ink density, trapping, post-script errors etc, that unless you know what you're doing, you're better off supplying a pro printer with the original files so they can fix those problems and charge you a lot for it.

Hey, can I fix this?

"There was an error opening this file. File does not begin with '%PDF-'."

YOU HELPEE

YEU HELPEE MEEEEEE

Preamble, shebang, or whatever you want to call it, PDF files often begin with %PDF-number, where number represents the PDF version number, so that the renderer can display the file correctly. My first guess is that if it's truly a PDF file, then there is some garbage before the shebang, or the file is encoded in some odd way.

Open the file with a text editor and see if you can locate the shebang close to the top. If there's some obvious garbage before it, delete it and see what happens.

I need a free Acrobat download NOW.

Tough to work from home when Adobe's subscription sign-in is trashed due to server issues.