Since the files are linked they would have to be stored with the illustrator job, which means that this job would take up 111.2MB of space! When I saved the illustrator file with the PDF compatible option checked the final file size was 88.6MB. The sum of all of the file sizes was 22.6MB. Both of those file sizes are tiny compared to the sizes of today hard drives.Īs an experiment, I placed five jpeg files into an illustrator document. I deleted the unused swatches and symbols in a test file and the size was reduced in size from 741KB to 676KB. The only way to decrease the file size of vector drawing further is to delete unused swatches and symbols but the reduction in size is slight.
If the file is purely a vector drawing then I would recommend allowing it to save it as a PDF compatible file because it would only embed the fonts and the increase in the file size is nominal. This feature may be might be necessary if you're going to place the illustrator file into InDesign, but if you work and output directly from illustrator then the PDF compatibility is unnecessary. This will allow the file to be previewed with Acrobat, the Finder, or by another application.
To make the file PDF compatible, Illustrator embeds the fonts and raster graphics into the illustrator file.
