PDFs from InDesign CS4 too large

Question

I'm trying to make a small PDF of a 20pp A4 publication (magazine) to email to my client (file/adobe PDF presets), but no matter what I do the files are huge. This never used to be an issue in earlier versions of CS??? Help Please

Answer 1

Boy, things are running along.
phairway: What's your goal? Are you all set? Do you want to fix the bug in CS4 (ha ha) or just want a workaround? It sounds like you've got a workaround so you are basically all set?
Hawkeye_Tui: You should have the tools necessary to either solve your problem or tell us more about it so we can help you solve it. How are you doing with that?
Moving right along...
I'm going to go out on a limb a little bit here and disagree with the "conventional wisdom" on this forum, that EPS files are somehow "bad" or "deprecated." There's nothing wrong with them inherently, and they do fill some niches that are otherwise unfilled, which makes them important. But they can cause you problems, and they are no longer the format of choice.
A ".ai" file is just a PDF file (with extra information). PDFs are less likely to run into problems with EPS files.
Bob says:
As already pointed out, EPS is ecapsulated. Stop using it.
There's nothing wrong with "encapsulation." In this context, it means that EPS files are a restricted subset of PostScript files that are only permitted to use a subset of the PostScript language (things like not modifying global state, not printing on more than one page, not drawing outside the bounding box that the comment at the top of the file indicates it will adhere to), and that it follows particular Document Structuring Conventions (DSCs) with special comments at the top of the file that tell an EPS-compliant application information about the file, such as the bounding box of the image.
PDF files are similar to EPS in this way -- they are almost an even-further restricted subset of the PostScript language, except they have their own format and are containerized differently, and the restrictions are...better-enforced.
It used to be the case that it was easier to specify a bounding box in an EPS file than a PDF file, because in a PDF you had to specify the page size, which always "felt wrong" to me...
Anyhow, an EPS file may have several ways of specifying the bounding box of the image, and [speculation] it's possible that CS3 and CS4 look at different methods. Or your EPS File may not be properly compliant, and might disagree with itself. It's [mostly] just a text file, so you can look at it in your favorite text editor (e.g. Notepad under WIndows or TextEdit on a Mac), and it should start something like this:
%!PS-Adobe-2.0
%%Title: patch.eps
%%Creator: fig2dev Version 3.2 Patchlevel 4
%%CreationDate: Thu Jan 19 14:45:39 2006
%%For: [email protected]
%%Orientation: Landscape
%%Pages: 1
%%BoundingBox: 0 0 612 792
%%DocumentPaperSizes: letter
%%BeginSetup
Sometimes you might see a  %%HiResBoundingBox  in addition, or maybe a %%CropBox. If those differ from the BoundingBox, they might be the source of your problem. It's instructive to look.
phairway, can you post screenshots of the exported PDFs from CS4 and CS4? I admit I'm having some trouble visualizing the effect you're actually describing. You might also try the CS5 trial and see how that works -- since the chances of a fix to your problem in CS4 seem vanishly small.
Back on the philosophical rant...I don't really feel like PSD files are a good substitute for EPS files...They're not an open format, not publicly documented. (Though, I was quite surprised to discover ImageMagick can read them...). That pretty much leaves PDF files.
Anyhow, I think Acrobat Professional's PDF optimizer should certainly be able "see inside" EPS files inside PDF files.
But really: PAGING DOV ISAACS: DOV ISAACS PLEASE PICK UP THE WHITE COURTESY PHONE!
Or something .