illustrator vector raster balance flatten

Doing that would rasterize the entire file. You don't 'flatten' things in Illustrator in the sense that you do in Photoshop. You are trying to think of Illustrator (object-based, vector) in Photoshop (single raster image) terms. I tried embedding the images in the poster but it made the file 248Mb instead of 68Mb and didn’t seem to help with any of the other issues either. The files is still big and the separate portions of the poster all load separately. Saving as PDFX-1a is not available on CS 11.0.0 but I tried it on a friend’s computer (CS 3) but again, it didn’t seem to flatten anything.The file was still big and the separate portions of the poster all loaded separately. Saving as PDF1.3 didn’t seem to flatten anything.Object Menu > Rasterize > Broke the whole poster into a grid of small squares making a huge file that took 10 minutes to load and had grey grid lines in places where the drop shadows were.Object Menu > Flatten Transparency > The drop shadows on the square images get thin grey lines around them ().Layer Palette > toggle button in upper right hand corner > Merge Selected: Got an error message that this was not possible.Layer Palette > toggle button in upper right hand corner > Flatten Artwork: This didn’t seem to do anything at all.This has two purposes: 1) to make the file smaller than the 68Mb it is now, and 2) to collect all the images in a single layer for ease of printing. I wish to flatten the file for printing because I was told to do by my printer. I made a poster (see screen shot here ) with many layers of photo images and text. Unfortunately none of the suggestions seem to have worked so I would like to go over what I have done and see if there are any other clues.

Thank you for all your help Wade, CHM, and Larry.

Illustrator vector raster balance flatten