Office 2007 PDF File Size Bloat

[catspaw00tng]

Hi all,

I have been running Office 2007 the first beta. The thing I was most excited
about (ok, one of the things) was the PDF converter. Even in the commercial
release, the PDF plug-in gave us cleaner, significantly smaller PDF files
than we ever got out of Acrobat Pro.

About a year ago, though, something changed. I'm afraid that I didn't
notice, so I'm not certain if it coincides with a service patch or hot-fix or
something, but what happened is that our PDF files became bloated.

For instance, I am currently working with a 27 KB .docx file, all text. When
I would convert to PDF using the plug-in before the problem, I would get a 34
KB PDF file. Now, I get a 228 KB file. Using the "minimum size" option for
the PDF converter, I get a 227 KB file.

Is there a solution for this? Is this something that's being worked on? My
firm is pushing to go to something new because we end up with PDF files that
are so bloated that we can't send them via e-mail, and 99% of our work is
sent in PDF. Since it was not a problem before, I'm at a loss to explain it
now.

Thanks,
-Wendy

 

[Yves Dhondt]

Sounds like a font embedding issue. In Acrobat (both Reader and
Professional), press CTRL+D and check the font tab. If it has (Embedded
Subset) next to most of the font names, then that is probably causing your
bloat.

If you have a copy of Adobe Acrobat Professional, you can furhter check this
by going to 'Advanced' => 'PDF Optimizer...' and clicking on 'Audit space
usage...'. This will tell you what part of your document takes up what
percentage of the file size.

If font embedding is causing the issue, than the following rules of thumb
can help you to minimize the PDF size in Word 2007:
1) Make sure 'ISO 19005-1 compliant (PDF/A)' is NOT selected.
2) Use fewer fonts.
3) Only use 'Times New Roman' or 'Arial' as fonts.
4) Don't abuse font styles (bold and/or italics).
5) Use smaller fonts.
6) Don't use special characters.

Regarding 1: 'ISO 19005-1 compliant (PDF/A)' forces all fonts used in the
text to be embedded inside the PDF. Depending on which fonts you used, this
can change the size of your PDF from only a little to a lot.

Regarding 2: The less fonts you use, the less fonts that will be embedded.

Regarding 3: Out of the box each PDF reader is supposed to handle 5
different fonts. This means that PDF creators are not required to include
those fonts to guarantee that the document is displayed correctly. The
add-in in Word 2007 however, only follows this rule for two fonts: 'Times
New Roman' (Times) and 'Arial' (Helvetica). All other fonts, or their
necessary subsets, will be embedded by Word 2007 when creating the PDF.

Regarding 4: The normal, bold, italics, and bold italics style of a font are
actually 4 different fonts. Hence, using bold and/or italics can make your
PDF grow a lot. Writing in color instead of applying bold often results in a
smaller PDF.

Regarding 5: Some fonts take up more space than others when included. For
example, I have a document with Calibri which results in a 230 kilobyte PDF.
I switched fonts from Calibri to Courier New and now the resulting PDF is
125 kilobyte. I'm not sure which fonts are the smallest.

Regarding 6: Even when you use only fonts like 'Times New Roman' and 'Arial'
subsets of the font can be included in case you are using exotic characters
which aren't commonly available.

Yves