Quark Forums

When using the XPress PDF export, PDFs are very large. In the PDF options the file size is unaffected by setting to Automatic JPEG/Zip from low to high compression. When set to manual JPEG compression the file sizes are much smaller. It appears that when set to Automatic there is no compression. Has anyone else noticed this? I have given up with the PDF export feature and now export postscript to Distiller or Print using the Adobe PDF printer.

If I am following you correctly I found that my also changing the selection to downsampling the images to say 72 dpi that this reduces the PDF file. Also checking the subset button on the top helps also. Is this any help?

When set to Automatic JPEG/Zip compression, low creates exactly the same size PDF as high and exactly the same quality (no compression). A 300dpi file is larger than a 72dpi, but there appears to be no compression. An A4 ad, which should be around 1.5 MB at 300dpi (High Quality or Low Compression) is 10MB because there is little or no compression unless it is set to manual JPEG in the PDF options of XPress 6.1.

That you get hold of Acrobat 6?

It has an excellent PDF optimizer option that helps alot. I got a 123 mb uncompressed PDF down to 280 k with it.

I am using Acrobat 6.0.1 (see first post) and it is excellent but it would be nice if the export PDF function in QuarkXPress 6.1 worked correctly, especially considering the price of the application. It would be much better if the 'Distill immediately' option was available in the preferences, as in QXP 4 and 5 with Acrobat 5 Distiller, instead of exporting postscript to a watched folder or printing using the Adobe PDF printer.

R u using a Mac or a Windows?

On a Mac you can see the PDF preferences under the Preferences option in the QuarkXPress menu. On a Windows, you will find the same under the Edit menu. It allows you to check the 'Direct to PDf' option which will allow you to distill the project immediately.

To compress the PDF size, in the same PDF preferences box click on the 'Default Options' button (on Windows, it is simply 'Options')and go to the 'Job Options' tab. Choose 'Manual JPEG High' as compression for both color and grayscale images. For resolution, choose 'Downsample to' for both and use 72 dpi. You can choose 'CCITT Group 4' for monochrome image compression.

This is really going to bring down the PDF file size.

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Have Fun.

Richard,
we've just moved from OS 9 to OS 10.3 and from Quark 5.7 to 6.0.1. As a result, 40MB files that were previously exported as 300KB PDF files are now 1.5MB in size. Did you ever find a solution to what I believe is the same problem as we have?
John.
310-244-4364

Richard:

When using the XPress PDF export, PDFs are very large. In the PDF options the file size is unaffected by setting to Automatic JPEG/Zip from low to high compression. When set to manual JPEG compression the file sizes are much smaller. It appears that when set to Automatic there is no compression. Has anyone else noticed this? I have given up with the PDF export feature and now export postscript to Distiller or Print using the Adobe PDF printer.