FYI: Fonts, Sub-Setting, File Size Reduction and Optimizer. Part 2

[Garrett_Cobarr@adobeforums.com]

The Nasty Surprise.

You need to be carefull with Acrobat's menu Advanced > PDF Optimizer... it can have unanticipated results.

1. It does not show embedded fonts from other applications (at least InDesign) only the fonts you embed in form fields, while in Acrobat.

2. You have no sub-setting options, it is all or nothing.

3. If you do not want to unembed your form field fonts, leaving your fonts in the left pane of the Fonts tab, and fail to uncheck or have checked "Discard all comments" under the "Clean-Up" tab, Acrobat will not only get rid of all the embedded fonts but all of your text form fields as well. The 44 KB "6.CAPS & SML & # Double3.pdf" file was reduced to 8 KB. A: review with Documents Properties > Fonts shows no fonts.

4. If you use the "Fonts" tab, move your fonts to the the right pane and unembed, your form field and its text remain intact but the font no longer looks like the font unless you have the menu item Advanced > Use Local Fonts checked. The 44 KB "6.CAPS & SML & # Double3.pdf" file was reduced to 8 KB. A: review with Documents Properties > Fonts shows:Actual Font: Sanvito-Roman
Actual Font Type: Type 1
When Use Local Fonts is chacked it displays...
Actual Font: Adobe Serif MM
Actual Font Type: Type 1

5. More crazy stuff. Acrobat will not let go back to the form field and re-establish the former font. It will let you choose another and save but get this the file will now be 40 KB. If you reopen this file you then can choose the original font.

I hope this is illuminating. Again any further comments or testing in Windows or with other originating applications would be great.

[Guy_Smiley@adobeforums.com]

Playing around with the PDF optimizer on extraordinarily small PDFs--
tens of kilobytes--is uninformative regarding how it will behave on
PDFs of a size that one would care to optimize--hundreds of kilobytes.

[Garrett_Cobarr@adobeforums.com]

Guy, what would be uniformative, would be to do a test on a large, complex PDF with all kinds of elements in it. How would you know what was and what was not contributing to its size?

This was meant to be simple and clean to allow a user to ignore or consider fonts as part of this descision process. The other 2 contributions to PDF size would be images and structural elements. I plan on tests with those issues as well.