PDFs suddenly larger?

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Jeff Mierzejewski Edited February 10, 2018 22:43

I've been using Finale and Adobe Acrobat for about 15 years to prepare weekly church music (liturgical plainchant). A week ago my current desktop machine died, and I had to switch to another: same versions of Finale 25 and Adobe Acrobat, but had to give up Windows 7 for Windows 10 at current maintenance, and of course, all my defaults got reset.

Today I had to make a one-character change to something I created in January, and the resulting PDF was almost twice as large as the one I made three weeks ago. As far as I can tell, all the settings are the same. Anyone know what could cause this sort of difference?

Old file: http://mci.archpitt.org/sheetmusic/general/Forgiveness_Vespers_old.pdf (101 KB)

New file: http://mci.archpitt.org/sheetmusic/general/Forgiveness_Vespers.pdf (193 KB)

Jeff

4 comments

Date Votes

MIKE HALLORAN Edited February 11, 2018 18:28

This is new to Finale 25.

Is the large file size the only issue—or is it something else? 193k vs 101k isn't an issue unless the files are now grey scale instead of true black. Is that what's happening to you?

Are you selecting pdf from the Print menu or another way?

Use the Graphics menu. Export as pdf. This will give you the smallest sized file.

On the Mac, there are a few differences between pdf from the Print menu vs Graphics/Export as. On a Mac, pdf files from the Print menu are much larger due to being greyscale instead of true black.

MIKE HALLORAN Posted February 10, 2018 22:41

For whatever reason, I could not access your files. No big deal except I was curious to see if one of them was greyscale instead of true black.

Jeff Mierzejewski Edited February 10, 2018 22:44

I am selecting File / Print, then Adobe PDF as before. It certainly LOOKS black, but I suppose it could be dark gray.

I did try Graphic, Export Pages, and the PDF went to 1,284 KB - twelve times the original size instead of twice.

Jeff

P.S. I fixed the links; stray invisible chars in cut and paste.

MIKE HALLORAN Posted February 11, 2018 17:57

I was able to download both versions and yes, one is larger than the other. I was able to reduce the file size on both using Adobe Acrobat Pro X but only 10k on the smaller file and 25k on the larger.

I am unable to duplicate your Graphics/Export as I don't have your original file and the Print menu behaves differently on a Mac. Likewise, Macs handle .pdf files differently as the basic functionality is built into the OS. Any results would be meaningless. Not having Win10 on my PC, I have no way of testing this further.

This may just be the way that Win10/Finale 25/Acrobat behave nowadays.

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