PDF/VT Output

[dreimer]

Does anyone know what the "Optimize (Compress) PDF" does in the output settings for a PDF/VT file? There is a Basic or Advanced option. I looked in the user guide and there was really no mention of this option.

 

TIA

Screen Shot 2021-02-25 at 11.44.34 AM.pdf

[Dan Korn]

Well, it compresses the output, for both PDF and PDF/VT, to reduce the file size.

 

The "Basic" compression is the same as it's been for a long time, and uses older techniques such as flate compression.

 

The "Advanced" compression takes advantage of newer features and better compression techniques in later versions of the PDF Library, and (depending on the other options you've selected regarding preserving annotations and accessibility and such) discards some extraneous data that's not needed for printing, to gain even further reductions in file size.

 

Some PDFs will get better gains from compression than others. Also, older RIPs might not handle all the newer compression techniques, depending on the version of the PDF Print Engine they're using. (And in some cases, the file size reduction may not actually improve the RIP time if the time that the RIP has to spend uncompressing the output is greater than the time saved by reading in a smaller file from disk.)

 

In all cases, we expect that output should render the same. That said, we recommend testing your output on your press with various compression settings to validate fidelity.