2009-02-20, 10:49
djh_ Wrote:Oh, and if anyone knows how to make high quality PDFs in InDesign I'd love to hear from them.
ethan_9219 Wrote:When exporting make sure to choose "Press Quality" as it is higher than "High Quality".
Make sure to turn off all down sampling as well.
But, if the primary distribution method of the manual is a digital PDF, then i think Press Quality might be overkill.
This is a couple of days old but I do this daily at work so I have some tips for you. I'm with ethan, It's a fine balance between quality and size.
My suggestions for a PDF that is used on screen predominately:
- Start by selecting the "High Quality Print" Preset up the top
- Make sure you have spreads turned off if you are designing your manual with facing pages (spreads prints pages side by side)
- Ensure compatibility goes back to PDF 1.4 (or Acrobat 5)
- Under the "Compression" section I like to:
- Set Bicubic downsampling to 150ppi
- Set the image quality to "High" (Max doesn't really add that much to the image quality but bloats the file size big time)
- Repeat for greyscale images
- Set Bicubic downsampling to 150ppi
- Export and examine quality versus file size - Adjust the ppi according to taste - rinse & repeat
This should give you a high quality output without all the bloat in the file.
Another couple of tips:
- You have the option to change the Doc colour space into RGB as this might be advantageous to the color in your RGB screenshots (I never touch this though)
- You can run the "PDF Optimizer" & "Reduce File Size" under Acrobat Pro. This is especially necessary if you make changes in Acrobat - I have had problems where it will bloat my 100kb forms out to over 2 mb with a simple text change.
Enjoy