Good morning everyone!
I have downloaded the trial version of InDesign to see if its the right tool to a very specific problem we are having in our engineering office and I have never used InDesign before.
I need to dramatically reduce the overall file size of multi-page PDFs for underlaying in AutoCAD while retaining the detail from the original. The PDF files we recevied from our client are rather large and underlaying them "as is" brings AutoCAD to a crawl. I have been able to shrink the files appropriately in Illustrator but I would have to do it one page at a time to be able to reduce the file size which does not solve our time problem (I have one project in the pipeline that is going to require 200 pages). JPEG's kind of work which I can do in batches in Illustrator, but AutoCAD does not have automation for underlaying JPEGs. Keeping the PDF in vector fomat is the ideal solution if we can get the file size down.
So far I have opened illustrator and tried to run the script for adding a multi-page PDF and what I bring in retains absolutely no detail from the PDF.
So two questions:
1) Can/How do I bring in a PDF drawing so it retains the vector detail, and
2) Can I use Illustrator to shrink down the file size of a multi-page PDF (Adobe pro doesn't bring it down far enough)
I know this is nowhere near the purpose of InDesign, but its our last avenue to solve our underlay issue in a way where everyone might win.
Thank you!