Trying to compress files in InDesign

Question

Making a project with all PDF files. I placed them all in Indesign and made a book. After PDF printing, the document was too large. I compressed it in Adobe Pro but some pages didn’t look good. I found if I compress each PDF individually they looked good. So I compressed each individually—all 50 pages. Most files went from 2,000 MB to 200 kb after compression. I removed the originals in Indesign, then replaced them all with the smaller compressed version. Then when I printed again to a PDF it was exactly the same size as with the larger PDFs. How can this happen? The individual page sizes were compressed to less than 1/3 of the original. I checked all the pages in Indesign to be certain I hadn’t made a mistake. Any ideas?

Answer 1

When you are inserting the compressed PDF's back into InDesign, the files are expanding back to normal. Just like when you have a small Jpeg file and you open it back up in Photoshop it expands back to the non-compressed format. When you are in InDesign go to the PDF export feature and pick "Smallest File Size". That should help, but it will also lower the resolution of you photos if any (I've attached a link to show you). Also, if you prefer, once you make your 50 page book a PDF in InDesign, just bring the entire file into Acrobat Pro and click on "Reduce File Size" for the entire document. There is no need to do one page at a time (I've attached a link to show you). Hope this helps.

http://www.digitalcrayon.net/wyZaNT/