When converting PostScript files to PDF, you can compress vector objects (such as text and line art) and compress and downsample images. Line art is described with a mathematical equation and is usually created with a drawing program such as Adobe Illustrator. Images—whether color, monochrome, or grayscale—are described as pixels and are created with applications like Adobe Photoshop or by scanning. Monochrome images include most black-and-white illustrations made by paint programs and any images scanned with an image depth of 1 bit.
When you downsample (or decrease the number of pixels), information is deleted from the image. With Distiller, you specify an interpolation method—average downsampling, bicubic downsampling, or subsampling—to determine how pixels are deleted. Depending on the settings you choose, compression and downsampling can significantly reduce the size of a PDF with little or no loss of detail and precision.
When Distiller processes a file, it normally applies the compression settings to images throughout the file. However, you can assign different compression and downsampling methods to individual images.
Before you create a PDF, you can take various approaches to applying different compression and downsampling options to the individual images that will go into that PDF:
Use Adobe Photoshop to resample and compress existing image files before using Distiller. When you are ready to create the PDF in Distiller, be careful to deselect the compression and downsampling or subsampling options.
Create separate PostScript files for each part of the document that you want to process differently, and use different compression options to distill each part. Then use Distiller to merge the files into a single PDF.
When you create color, grayscale, and monochrome images in an art application (such as Adobe Photoshop), select the compression and downsampling settings that you want when you save each image from within that application.
Insert Distiller parameters before images in a PostScript file. You can use this technique to process every image in a document differently. This technique is the most difficult, because it requires knowledge of PostScript programming. For more information on using parameters, see the Acrobat Distiller Parameters manual on the Acrobat SDK documentation page (English only) on the Adobe website.