How to reduce SSRS PDF Export Size

Question

I have a SSRS report that is Exported to PDF. The report has one table with 2 lines. (A header with no formatting and one record). The PDF export that is created is 130K. I am sure that this is much larger than it needs to be.

Is there any way to reduce the size of the created PDFs from SSRS? Or any issues that can bloat a PDF from SSRS that I should be aware of?

Answer 1

The best generic answer to this question is probably:

• Open and inspect the code in the RDL file: it's just an XML file, and even if you don't understand the specifics you'll probably be able to spot the things that cause a report to grow beyond control.

In addition to this generic tip, there's two things that are known to cause the specific problem you mention:

• If you are using specific fonts in your report, those may be included in the rendered PDF? (I'm not 100% sure if SSRS even does that, but it can't hurt to check.)
• Check if you have "lingering" images that were embedded as resources: images that aren't used but are still embedded. View the images embedded as resources, and completely delete the ones you don't use anymore.