Why are PDFs from illustrator so much larger than from INDD?
I could have the same layout in illustrator and in INDD, use the same export settings, and illustrator PDFs are always super big. Maybe it's because they hold data from artboards that weren't included in export. I've tried opening the PDFs back into Illustrator to delete unnecessary artboards, and random stuff on pasteboard. I've tried deleting all hidden layers. Rasterizing masked photos doesn't work either. I could have a 4meg pdf from INDD, or one from AI would be 80megs. Thanks for considering.
pageh
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This most probably happens because of the 'Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities' option you can spot in the 'Save Adobe PDF' dialog.
It inserts a full copy of the document (in Ai’s native PGF language) inside your generated PDF, to make sure you can edit it back in Illustrator, if you want to (MANY users save their docs into these 'editable PDFs').
The more images your document has, the heavier it makes the PDF.
InDesign never cares about this backwards compatibility, every PDF produced is a final thing to view and print only, and you can’t edit it back fully.Please try to disable the option (and save the settings as a new preset for future use) and compare the results.
