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PDF exports are much too big for practical use. Affinity Publisher 2 export is about 10 times bigger than Indesign


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Finally about a year ago I cancelled my full Adobe subscription and am fully committed to the Publisher 2. For my needs I have generally no regrets.

A very common task for me ist creating some kind of portfolio/lookbook PDFs (I am a photographer) to send out to clients or potential clients.

I habe been looking around this forum but can not find a solution anywhere. The exported PDFs, only large enough for screen viewing coming from Publisher 2 are way too large.

My standard setting: About 8-10 pages in A4, 144dpi rasterised, all images larger than 144dpi will be reduced in size, JPG compression 75%, minimal amount of text (my Logo, my adress, and possibly 5 lines). Fonts and layers are not included.

Never ever was I able to produce e PDF smaller than 34MB, whilst the same thing from Indesign is around 3,5MB, including links and the font.

There is something fundamentally wrong here and I am desperate for solutions.

The last time I actually went ahead and exported all pages as JPGs with the same settings and added them together to an PDF in another application, and voila, I had a document with the expected 3.2MB for an 8 page document.

Anybody here who has a solution? I have tried about any possible settings and I am not exactly a beginner with this kind of apps so I think the problem is within Affinity Publisher. I have found online similar complaints but it seems those haven't been addressed yet.

I would be extremely grateful for suggestions and woul ideally love to hear from Affinity directly.

Attached is a screenshot with my settings.

Screenshot 2024-10-22 at 20.02.52.jpg

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  • 3 weeks later...
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@BinBerlin13 Welcome to the forums.

If you can provide a copy of your .afpub file I can take a look to see if anything may be causing the larger than expected PDF sizes. 

Using a quick test document of 10 pages 300DPI RGB/8 using sRGB colour profile. Each page has a single image inserted (300DPI/sRGB) and some text below each image. When exported to PDF using the settings from your screenshot the exported PDF is around 2MB.

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I'd also recommend turning off 'Convert Image Colour Spaces', as that always seems to unreasonably bump up the file size when I have that ticked. 

Changing the PDF version has helped in the past too (Compatibility).

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