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Very Large PDFs with Minion Pro
Posted by cdavidson in
1 Jul 2011 — 9:30pm
1 Jul 2011 — 9:30pm
Hi there,
Over the past few years I have set many documents in Minion Pro. Typically they're only about 3,000 words long and have no graphics, but when printed as a PDF out of Microsoft Word (I tried LyX but my citation format does not play well at all) the PDF file is a whopping 62mb! Trying to send a document of this size to a printer over our organisation's (unfortunately) browser-based print server is a nightmare.
Does anyone know how to reduce the file size of PDF documents set in Minion Pro? Is there some export setting I have overlooked in Microsoft Word?
I am running Mac OS10.6.8 with Word 2011.
Many thanks.
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1 Jul 2011 — 10:07pm
This is due to how Word create PDF files. It will rasterize rather than embed "no embedding" fonts and non-TrueType fonts. It was never ment for this kind of work anyway. If you have the budget for a graphic designer, I’d be happy to typeset the document for you. Feel free to contact me! Other options: try Cute PDF Writer or MakePDF.
2 Jul 2011 — 3:58am
Try opening your Word generated doc in Mac's Text Edit program then save as PDF-may solve problem Frank mentioned.
2 Jul 2011 — 4:19am
You’re using Word to generate the PDF? Can’t you just use your Mac’s Print > Save as PDF function? That should embed the Minion instead of rasterizing it.
2 Jul 2011 — 7:58am
> Can’t you just use your Mac’s Print > Save as PDF function?
I often use that method if I need a quick PDF and don't want to bother launching Acrobat, but one disadvantage is there's no way to control the quality of the PDF's graphics when you make it that way. However that may not be a problem for you since you mentioned your PDFs are usually just text.
2 Jul 2011 — 5:24pm
Hi all,
I tried giving 'Print to Adobe PDF' a go and my file size is now down to under 1mb... thankfully! I think the reason I gave up on 'Print to Adobe PDF' in the past was because it kept crashing, but now that problem seems to have been resolved.
5 Jul 2011 — 10:32am
Minion Pro has editable embedding. The Adobe website says so, and I confirmed it with my installed Minion fonts using the Microsoft font property extension. I just PDF'd a Word document (on Windows) with over 10,000 words and no graphics using the "Convert to Adobe PDF" plugin in Word and it came out 14 KB. If I printed the Word document to a .ps file and distilled that, it came out 46 KB. This is not a Word problem (unless there's something in the Word document that hasn't been mentioned -- for instance, is track changes turned on, or do you have versions?). More likely, Distiller is set up wrong.