PDF file sizes

[Guest]

PDF files produced from Word in Office 2007 under Vista seem to be very much
bigger than similar files produced from Word in Office 2000 under Windows
2000 (usually nearly 10 times bigger). Is this a "feature" that we have to
learn to live with, or am I doing something wrong?

 

[Andrew McLaren]

PDF files produced from Word in Office 2007 under Vista seem to be very
much
bigger than similar files produced from Word in Office 2000 under Windows
2000 (usually nearly 10 times bigger). Is this a "feature" that we have to
learn to live with, or am I doing something wrong?

Hi Keith,

Vista is not the significant factor, here - Vista is just the underlying
Operating System. You'd be better off asking this question in an
Office-oriented newsgroup, such as microsoft.public.office.misc.

FWIW, I ran a quick test. I converted a 55K Word 97-2003 Document into a PDF
using Adobe Acrobat, and Word's own PDF export facility. Acrobat created a
49K PDF. Word created a 176K PDF. When I selected the "Minimum size" option
in Word, the PDF came out as 168K When I saved the document in 2007
*.docx format, it came out as 22K - a significant reduction in size.

So it seems like Word's PDF converter is not as efficient as Acrobat, based
on my extremely limited test. But there could be many variables, such as
what PDF options you select, whether the document contains graphics etc. A
10x increase seems a bit pathological.

Probably the folks in the Office newsgroup can give more useful advice.

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi Keith,

PDF is not a format native to Word, it uses .doc/.docx by default, but there
are plug-ins that offer saving in this format. Since 2000, I would imagine
that several features and capabilities have been added, so the file size for
similar documents is likely to be larger due to the additional information.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[Guest]

Hi Keith,

Vista is not the significant factor, here - Vista is just the underlying
Operating System. You'd be better off asking this question in an
Office-oriented newsgroup, such as microsoft.public.office.misc.

FWIW, I ran a quick test. I converted a 55K Word 97-2003 Document into a PDF
using Adobe Acrobat, and Word's own PDF export facility. Acrobat created a
49K PDF. Word created a 176K PDF. When I selected the "Minimum size" option
in Word, the PDF came out as 168K When I saved the document in 2007
*.docx format, it came out as 22K - a significant reduction in size.

So it seems like Word's PDF converter is not as efficient as Acrobat, based
on my extremely limited test. But there could be many variables, such as
what PDF options you select, whether the document contains graphics etc. A
10x increase seems a bit pathological.

Probably the folks in the Office newsgroup can give more useful advice.

Thanks for your trouble and your test results. I tried some similar
comparisons after installing a trial version of deskPDF from docudesk. This
acts as a virtual printer as far as Word is concerned so is very simple to
use. A docx file from which Word produced a 140KB PDF file resulted in an
18KB PDF file from deskPDF; a PDF file of 101KB produced by Word became an
11KB PDF file when written by deskPDF; and I have many other examples showing
similar size reductions.

The large and small PDF files look identical. I've no idea what Word might
be filling its PDF files with, but it seems to be a totally unnecessary
overhead.