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sarah_pnix · 09-16-2011, 11:59 AM

I work for an academic publisher and I'm trying to produce PDF "ebooks" of large technical textbooks. For example, the print book may be 700 pages with images (some vector-based, some pixel-based) on roughly 80% of the pages. I've become pretty familiar with the different Acrobat optimization settings and can get the PDFs down to the 20-40MB range, which I consider pretty reasonable for all that content. The problem is we're having some performance issues. The PDFs work pretty well in Adobe Digital Editions—some page turns are a little slow but not bad. However in the ebook reader app on the iPad, some of them are REALLY slow and even completely freeze up the app. Some large ones are fine, so it's not just a matter of file size alone.

Could be an app issue, could be an iPad issue, could be a PDF issue. Or all of the above. For my part, I'm trying to figure out what all I can do to make the PDF as streamlined as possible. Of course, the images still need to be high enough quality to see (we're not talking about pretty photos here, but technical drawings, charts, maps, etc.). There's a bookmark for each chapter start (average of 20-30 chapters), but I tried to not to muck it up with too many bookmarks/hyperlinks.

Any thoughts? I've pored over the line items in the "Audit Space Usage" window, but can't seem to find the silver bullet there. Has anyone encountered anything besides image resolution that can make the PDF more efficient?

I appreciate any ideas,
Sarah

09-16-2011, 11:59 AM	#1
sarah_pnix Member Posts: 14 Karma: 10 Join Date: Feb 2010 Device: none	optimizing large PDFs I work for an academic publisher and I'm trying to produce PDF "ebooks" of large technical textbooks. For example, the print book may be 700 pages with images (some vector-based, some pixel-based) on roughly 80% of the pages. I've become pretty familiar with the different Acrobat optimization settings and can get the PDFs down to the 20-40MB range, which I consider pretty reasonable for all that content. The problem is we're having some performance issues. The PDFs work pretty well in Adobe Digital Editions—some page turns are a little slow but not bad. However in the ebook reader app on the iPad, some of them are REALLY slow and even completely freeze up the app. Some large ones are fine, so it's not just a matter of file size alone. Could be an app issue, could be an iPad issue, could be a PDF issue. Or all of the above. For my part, I'm trying to figure out what all I can do to make the PDF as streamlined as possible. Of course, the images still need to be high enough quality to see (we're not talking about pretty photos here, but technical drawings, charts, maps, etc.). There's a bookmark for each chapter start (average of 20-30 chapters), but I tried to not to muck it up with too many bookmarks/hyperlinks. Any thoughts? I've pored over the line items in the "Audit Space Usage" window, but can't seem to find the silver bullet there. Has anyone encountered anything besides image resolution that can make the PDF more efficient? I appreciate any ideas, Sarah