...there are many variables involved with graphics, quite often you have to do two workflows, one for web and one for commercial printing as they both require quite different approaches.
...usually with printing to desktop devices your image resolutions for bitmaps need to target 150dpi to accomodate higher resolution devices. But commercially printed work requires around 260dpi to 350dpi.
...other than full color bitmaps your only other options are to maintain vector work as vector, and keeping fonts as fonts...for this type of work your better to build in indesign, quark or illustrator.
...depending on the artwork structure the other format option is to have elements as 1bit images (i.e. line art graphics) as these contain less information compared to greyscale images that could otherwise be 1bit images instead.
...if you were to structure your artwork inside indesign, quark or illustrator it's possible you could achieve smaller file sizes targeting image compression at 150dpi for desktop printers, keep in RGB colorspace and have placed 1bit images (at 600dpi to 1400dpi) instead of greyscale images where possible.
...when exporting to PDF from a layout application you need to ensure that the PDF settings are set to target a specified resolution (150dpi for bitmaps) and ensure that RGB colorspace is used to keep file sizes low as CMYK will create bigger files.
...from here you can then further optimize in Acrobat advanced options.
...unfortunatley there is no one size fits all approach, so if you find that after PDF optimization your file sizes don't get smaller then it's unlikely they will get smaller from that point forward.
...the only other compression within Acrobat Pro is to use JPEG2000 instead of the normal JPEG compression for bitmaps...
...it's very much experimentation, but generally preserving vector is the first thing to try, keeping in RGB, 150dpi for desktop printing, use 1bit images where possible...
...other than this you can only go to complete bitmap images for entire pages, but without testing both approaches you won't now which will priovide the smallest possible PDF pages.
andrew
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