PDF File With Bloated File Size SOLVED

[End User]

A friend asked me to help him out yesterday. He had a set of architectural drawings that he downloaded off of a Dropbox type service that were too large to email out to his subcontractors.

The original file as downloaded from Dropbox was 52.38 MB's. He asked me to break this down in smaller files, so he could keep his email attachment size down to 10 MB's or less.

The plans were only 11 pages, so I decided to just break out each page as its own file, so he could pick and choose which pages to send to which subcontractors. I performed this task by simply dragging an individual thumbnail over into a document folder one by one.

Surprisingly, once I was done dragging all 11 pages over, I saw that nine of the pages were less than one Megabyte, with one being 1.2 MB's and one being 5.8 MB's. The total of all separate 11 pages was 12.8 MB's (according to Microsoft Outlook).

I then went back to the original 52 MB file and simply did a 'Save As' and gave it a different file name and surprisingly it too had a total file size of 12.7 MB's (according to Microsoft File Explorer).

I do not see any discernable differences in the quality or resolution between the original and the separate pages or between the original and the 'Save As' copy, so I'm inquiring on what else may be going on here.

It seems like the original PDF file somehow ended up with a bloated file size for some reason. Is PDF-XChange somehow automatically cleaning up this bloat or correcting some type corruption?

I apologize if this topic has been covered. I searched for PDF File Size and looked through quite a few pages of results without seeing anything relevant.

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello End User,

Thanks for the post.
It is possible that this file being created from a CAD software has some thousands of layers - those are invisible on the pages, and would not really affect the quality of the content on the pages themselves, however would affect the file size. Other such invisible objects might be Named Destinations - and again we have seen files with thousands of automatically generated such destinations that would bloat the file. That said - both of the above examples would usually mean that a "Save As" of the original file would stay with roughly the same size, while extracting individual pages (where the whole layers tre or the whole named destinations list won't be copied) will become quite smaller.

So my suspicion is that there was some malformed data in that file that was bloating it, and when you resaved it we did correct it and that made the file smaller. Without seeing the actual file - the above is all speculation, however in most cases where we can correct errors in a file that will not result in actual data loss on the pages - we will try to do so, and would not usually remove layers/named destinations information on a "Save As..." operation.

Kind regards,
Stefan

[End User]

Stefan, thanks for your input. While the file is somewhat sensitive, so I can't post it here, I would be willing to somehow get it in your hands for evaluation if you have the ability for me to upload that large of a file somewhere for you.

Please let me know if there is a way I can upload this somewhere that will not make it available to the general public.

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello End User,

Please e-mail us to support@pdf-xchange.com and I will share with you a link to our internal cloud where you can upload the document!

Kind regards,
Stefan