Huge PDFs: Sound familiar?I had an interesting problem today (which isn't that unusual, however): A user wanted to send out a PDF file which was scanned in full color. But, the scanned PDF was 13Mb in size, which is over our 10Mb size limit for outbound attachments.
I tried a freeware tool called 'PDF Compressor', but it only reduced it down by a few hundred KB. Not enough.
So, out of desperation, I thought I would just try to print the PDF via PDFCreator and see what came out.To my surprise, my 13Mb file came out to 3Mb total! Nice! I'm guessing that PDFCreator reduces the color quality down from millions of colors to thousands, but I'm not totally sure...not that I care - as long as the content is there, and it is legible (with no discernible difference in overall quality).
Either way, my user was happy, and so am I.
Note that this technique works best when the originating PDF is a non-indexed scanned document (not one that has various PDF elements inside, like selectable text, textboxes, clickable links, etc.).
Get PDFCreator here
5 comments:
your friend created an uncompressed (images) pdf.. you can create pdf files with jpg or zip (better, no quality loss) compression... your pdf creator probably had these options on by default.
@anonymous: Ahhhh...thank you! I'm no PDF expert, and this one came from a third-party, so there was no way to tell how it was done.
Thanks again!
You can get even better results if you tweak the compression settings. With PDF compression settings for color and grayscale images resampled to 150dpi, I made a 15 meg pdf in to a 6 meg pdf with only a small loss in image quality. I love PDFcreator!
One word for PDF Creator ...SWEET!
Nice. Another solution to try is Free PDF Creator.
This allows you to use lossy or non-lossy compression, the latter of which might help out with performing the conversion without losing image quality.
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