ESRI Mapping Center - Maps: Oregon Earthquakes

When we first exported this map to a PDF file, we ended up with a 8.5 Mb file. This was a result of:

not eliminating information,
used 600 DPI, and
setting the Output Image Quality (OIQ) set to Best.

This output file size seemed large to us, especially for a letter size page. So we started experimenting by incrementally decreasing first the DPI and then the OIQ until we got to 3.1Mb PDF file with comparable visual quality. To produce the smaller sized file, we ended up using 300 DPI and OIQ = 2. The result was barely different in appearance from the first bloated file.

We did have a number of failed experiments, though. For example, we tried OIQ = 3, and while the file was 2.7Mb, the visual quality was noticeably lower, and we would have been embarrassed using this as the final export file.

Exporting to PDF posted by Eadie Meyer on Jul 11 2007 2:26PM

Looks fantastic and PDF is a great (smallish) file size. I often have trouble exporting a reasonable size PDF when my MXD contains transparencies - was a transparency used for the hillshade or was some other symbology used?

Very nice map, but I usually have problems posted by sephy friedman on Jul 23 2007 2:57AM

exporting to .pdf: some of the text doesn't show or show up in Gibberish, the symbols doesn't look 100% O.K., the letters of a word are sometimes stacked up in a pile etc.
I wonder if the team that produced this map has also encountered such problems.

exporting to PDF posted by Dave Tewksbury on Oct 5 2007 11:13AM

Sephy,

When exporting MXD to PDF, be sure that the "embed all document fonts" box found on the Format tab under options is checked. This seems to solve most of the issues I had with PDF exports. There are still some N arrow symbols and fonts that come out as "gibberish" particularly when the PDF is opened on a Mac system.

Cheers,

Dave

posted by Charlie Frye on Nov 19 2007 12:12PM

No transparency was used for the hillshade; we changed the color ramp from black to white to a light gray to white; achieving the same effect without causing unnecessary additional rasterization of the export file.

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