CorvusC

This is definitely not expected, as evidenced by the results with an embedded file, and is not what InDesign would produce, for example. For a file to contain 20 (or however many) identical copies of an image is an error.

PDFs exported from Publisher that contain multiple copies of placed PDFs (e.g. a logo appearing on every page) contain a copy of the place PDF for every occurrence in the document. The expected behaviour would be for the placed file to be included only once and referenced wherever it occurs. The colour space information in a simple vector PDF takes up far more space than the image data and quickly creates a very large file (I produced a 17-page document which, on export, was over 18MB. Acrobat's Audit Space Usage showed that 15MB of this was accounted for by colour spaces. Using Acrobat's opti

I have found the quality of the export to be fine, apart from the file bloat caused by multiple copies of placed PDFs. Trying to mitigate this by increasing compression of bitmapped images will cause poor quality, though. If you're using a Mac you could try Panic's free tool ShrinkIt, which removes much of the unnecessary information without any recompression. Otherwise the only way I can find to get a reasonably sized export directly from Publisher is as I described above - use the Resources Manager to set placed PDFs to be embedded rather than linked, then move the originals from to a differ

Very strange. Thanks for trying. The file simply has the PDF logo placed on a master page, and two pages created from that master, so it's very easy to recreate.

Strange - I just downloaded it and it opened fine in Publisher 1.9.0 (Mac). Here's a zipped version. PDF passthrough test.afpub.zip

OK, there is some very odd behaviour going on here. I identified the core problem using Acrobat's Preflight inventory feature - there's a hideous gotcha in PDF passthrough: if you have a logo on every page, for example, that PDF will be passed through to the exported PDF every time it appears in the document. So if you have 20 pages, you'll have 20 embedded logos. With 20 associated colour profiles. Acrobat's PDF optimizer recognises them as the same object and strips all but one of the copies, massively reducing the file size. But - this only happens with PDFs that are linked in the Publ

I'm unsure whether to report this as a bug, so I thought I'd post a question here first and see if anyone has a similar experience. I've just produced a 17-page document which, on export, was over 18MB. This seemed ridiculously large for the number of images and settings used, so I had a look with Acrobat's Audit Space Usage, to find that 15MB of this was accounted for by colour spaces. Using Acrobat's optimize function to discard objects and user data and clean up the file got rid of these, and left a 3MB file without any recompression of the images. The attached files show the export se