This seems to be something new as I don't recall having the problem before. I also can't think of anything I'm doing differently.

I received a 12 page PDF and dragged a single page to the desktop where it was opened in Graphic converter and some editing done. No new material added, just re-arranging existing images. The edited file was saved in a folder under a new name.

I do remember that, when saving, I got a dialogue box saying something about having to flatten an alpha channel. I just agreed.

The new file is gigantic. Where the 12 page PDF was 1.5 megs, the new single page exceed 14 megs.

Why am I not saving at a much smaller size?

ryck

Yes, that is correct. That is exactly what I would expect from opening a PDF with Graphic Converter.

Graphic Converter is a graphics program. When it opens a PDF, it "rasterizes" the PDF--that it, it makes the PDF into a picture, and breaks it up into pixels.

Let's say you have a PDF that contains nothing but the words "hello world" in the middle of an 8.5x11" page. s a PDF, that file would be only a couple of kilobytes in size--it would be tiny, because it contains nothing but eleven letters (including the space).

Now you open it in Graphic Converter. At 8.5x11" and 300 pixels per inch, that page would be 24 megabytes in size!

That's because once you open it up in Graphic Converter, it no longer is made of eleven letters. The text is changed into a picture. It's as if you had printed the PDF out onto a sheet of paper, then used a digital camera to take a photograph of the sheet of paper--the image is going to be a lot bigger than a simple text file would be.

Rats.

Good to know for future reference. Meanwhile is there some way, perhaps opening and doing the Save in another program, that I can reduce the files for shipping? These are to demonstrate layout suggestions only. The original artwork is with a graphics designer who makes the final product.

ryck

I witnessed the same effect awhile ago between acrobat and word.

Secretary downloaded a 4mb pdf, filed in some fields, and saved it, to a 56mb pdf. (that wouldn't email, gee wonder why?0

Solution was to open it in acrobat pro and edit there instead. At the time I chalked it up to something internally being compressed, and word was able to uncompress on load but not recompress on open.

Acrobat Pro is somewhat (okay, a lot) more than I'd want to pay for the kind of stuff I do with these files. It's just layout suggestions and even colour reciprocity is not a big issue.

Having said that, this is turning out quite educational (for me, anyway). I thought I'd compress the file and used the demo version of DropStuff which took 25.651 megs and reduced them to 20.8 MB. I thought that would be perfect for my ISP's file size limits which thought were low 20's. (It turns out they're higher.)

Anyway, when I tried to send the compressed file I got a dialogue box that said my file was 28.5 MB exceeding their limit of 28 MB. Say what!?? I asked the ISP why they thought my 20.8 MB file was 28.5 MB and it turns out that a 128 encryption process fattens emails. Rats again.

However, they suggested I could set up something called an FTP site through them that would allow uploading of big files that the other person could download. I haven't checked it out yet but it does sound interesting.

And, back to the basics, it would be good to find a program that would allow me to do this kind of PDF editing (moving stuff around, copy and paste PDF material) without the raster effect that Tacit described.

Or, barring that, something to reduce the size of the larger PDF files created by Graphic Converter.

ryck

Personally I would use Adobe Acrobat, it is pricey but it works very well and the other apps that come immediately to mind are also from Adobe and even pricier. I don't know what your pain threshold on cost is but you might take a look at PDFpenPRO at $100.

I second the previous post about Acrobat. You can save a trimmed version of pdf using Acrobat (using compatibility or optimization options). Its cost is about 120 dollars for student and teacher edition.

You can reduce the resolution of the raster PDF in GraphicConverter, but other than that, you'll have to edit them using a program that doesn't rasterize the PDF in the first place.