Document File Size

If you insert a large image into a document and then scale down its size, this increases its effective DPI resolution because the original image data is still used rather than being resampled or compressed. With an image’s effective DPI now increased, you have the opportunity to reduce its resolution whilst still keeping it above the minimum 300 DPI required by many print shops. Doing this can produce significant reductions in document file size.

After inserting images into an iStudio document and scaling them to the required size in your layout you can use the Image Inspector to check that each image has an effective DPI of at least 300. To do this, select an image, go to the Image Inspector, set the Use DPI adjustment to 300, and in the Fit section make sure that its Scale setting is at 100% or less. Repeat this for each image. Any images with a Scale setting of much less that 100% can be resized and resampled in an image editing app, so as to increase their Scale setting nearer to 100% when reinserted into the iStudio document.

To avoid having to pre-process images and reduce their file sizes prior to insertion in a document, you can reduce document file size by splitting up your complete document across several separate document files, each containing a smaller number of images. This method requires a final step of assembling the complete document from all of the individual documents, which can done by exporting each of the iStudio documents to PDF file and then combining the PDFs.

When exporting a document to PDF file, iStudio does not compress image data. Whilst Method 2 can be used to keep individual iStudio documents below the maximum file size it won’t reduce the size of the final PDF file. Instead, you can use the following method of reducing PDF file size.

If you wish to combine multiple PDF files and reduce PDF file size it’s generally most efficient to reduce the size of the individual PDF files before assembling these into the final PDF.