Yikes! My "clarification" actually confused things. That seems to happen a lot...
I'm not trying to make a smaller DWF. What I'm trying to do is avoid making multiple DWFs (one for each detail). I want to use the one "project DWF" that has all the sheets, and just show the user a particular page & area (I want to set the DWF's initial view using HTML code). That way, the user can search for a particular type of detail, and the results would show him/her the detail in the "project DWF". If they want to see the detail in context, they can zoom out & see the rest of the sheet, or look at the other sheets in the project (because it's all in one DWF).
I would expect that this shouldn't affect file size greatly (since at most I would just need to create some named views to be stored in the DWF). Ideally, I'd like to be able to specify the view by sheet & coordinates (without having to create named views first), but that's not too much of an inconvenience.
It doesn't need to be an irregular view. Most of our details are on rectangular grids. For the rare ones that are "L" or "Z" shaped (for large details and/or crowded sheets) seeing the other details is acceptable.