using FM-8 built in PDF engine i am getting GINORMOUS pdf file sizes... my biggest so far is 50megs for a 15 pg textual report.

Any one else having this problem???

Yes, I'm seeing this problem, but not to the extent that you are. My 120 page report comes in at 400k when created in Acrobat 6. But when printed to PDF directly out of Filemaker, it swells to 5.4 MB, an increase of 13 times.

It seems Fm-8 is set to print PDF files in High Res. If you go and lower this setting is should signifigantly lower the file size

How do you lower the setting? (It isn't in my preferences.)

There was a recent post on this same topic.

Recent Post

HTH

Lee

when you go to send as and then select .pdf there is a security option. choose that.

then choose password but do not enter a password and there is an area where you can change the pdf resolution to a lower setting.

this will reduce the size of the file greatly

I just tried your suggestion. It did not change the size of the pdf at all.

I'm also seeing enormous PDF sizes...

I've seen posted on other forums that the problem is that FM is including entire font definition within the PDF (which is not bad in itself) but that it's actually including the entire font definition every time you have a text style change.

So "Hi Bob nice to See you" would end up with your font definition inserted 3 times in the PDF.

So, a possible work-around would be to try to make your entire document in a single font and limit the use of bold/underline/italic.

Anyone willing to experiment and report success/failure?

This won't fix it in FM but file size is critical to us and we send PDF's to our customers daily. We use PDF Compress, it can strip out all the font files, compress the graphics etc.. If you use the Basic 13 Adobe PDF fonts you can really crunch the file size. It's $27- and we swear by it for our business. http://www.metaobject.com/

hmmmm thanks....seems like there's always this extra stuff to use and by for what should be simple fixes....

Thanks!!

Bambi

This DEFINITELY seems to be the case for me. A simple layout with some bolding on various items produced a 12MB file, simply changing all the text to Arial, plain text, dropped the file to 344K!!

Seems like FileMaker should be releasing a fix for this!

I'm experimenting now (I have 15+ MB PDF reports), but PDF compress doesn't bring the size down nearly enough. We also need the bold headings in the reports.

Anybody have any new ideas?

In OSX try to PRINT The document as a PDF?

Printing and then selecting "PDF" is just as big.

Also, I don't seem to reap any benefit from getting rid of bolding or putting in Arial, as suggested.

Have you tried this in 8.5? - All my huge PDFs returned to normal as soon as I upgraded. (Also running Tiger)

I'm working in 8.5 -- no difference. (Though I seem to remember smaller sizes with one of the earlier versions...not quite sure.)

Does anyone have a solution for this problem? -- I'm still grappling. Is this a problem on Windows?