How big is too big?

[Mike Wickham]

> We would like to place some of our larger manuals online for download
> but don't know whether the PDFs will be too big. Is there a general
> guideline limit (1MB, 10MB, 25MB?) for the size of a PDF for download?
> Most of  our users are corporate, so we anticipate each will have a
> high-speed connection. However, we certainly can't guarantee all of them
> will be.

I remember the horror of 10MB downloads on dial-up. 25MB downloads were 
total misery. I'm guessing that graphics are what make your files large, so 
perhaps the solution is to make two versions of the PDF-- one with high-res 
graphics, and one with low-res to reduce file size. Then, let the downloader 
choose according to the speed of his connection. You can even set Distiller 
to resample the graphics to low-res when creating the PDF. So there's no 
requirement to keep two versions of the graphics on disk.

Mike Wickham