PDF Function Outputs Very Large File Size

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Posted on by WillPage

2,339 Super User 2026 Season 1

Hello,

I'm using the PDF function to create a PDF from a portrait printable screen in an otherwise landscape app.

The screen has two images on with a combined total of about 150 kb of media (these are a logo/letterhead type image and a 240x240 image of a product), plus a few HTML text labels and a horizontal container, which contains two vertical containers that each contain about 45 plain text labels.
I'm using the ExpandContainers option in the PDF function because the vertical container scrolls off the end of the screen.
It's pretty simple really: A company logo, a product image and some brief info in the top part of a portrait page, then a series of rows of text that spill over to about 1/2 of the second page.

It all works great, I'm happy with the result, except that the output file is about 30MB in size. It seems ridiculously large for what it is. The PDF looks mostly like this:

I've tried playing around with DPI settings in the PDF function but nothing seems to change the file size at all.
Is this known/expected? What can I do to reduce the file size?

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JustinWesty 7 on at

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I have the same issue, a powerful feature but the size of the PDF is crazy. did you get anywhere on this?

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WillPage 2,339 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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I did actually. I found the issue was with the logo/banner image I was using. I think the PDF converter expands everything to bitmap and the logo was a higher resolution than the image control. I downscaled the PNG to match the control and saved as JPG, which got around the issue.
The file is still larger than I'd like but it's manageable.
There are issues with images with this feature. Sometimes the mere presence of an image causes the PDF page it's on to be blank. I haven't worked out what characteristic of an image makes it do that so I put a toggle control in the app to hide the images if the user has an issue with the generated file.

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KMcKenzieACSO 22 on at

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The PDFs I was producing/emailing out were a whopping 26MB each! I read your post, turned off the visibility of the two images I had and all of the sudden, the next email is down to 136KB. Thanks for the advice.

I was having trouble getting controls on the page to be visible in the PDF, and I was able to work around the problem by adding all the controls to a container, then pointing the PDF() function at the container instead.

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