"Shrinking" the size of a pdf

[Karebear]

I have a user that has a rather large pdf file that needs to be emailed out to folks along with this as an attachment she must take a snapshot of the first page and put that in the body of the email. The email is so large that it won't open for folks because of the size.
Here is the strange part, someone that worked at this company previously was able to "shrink" it from a 4 meg to a 1 meg. I can't seem to figure out how to do this, does anyone have a clue how to do this?
I am stumped!
Thanks in advance for any information that you can offer,
KL

 

[vjmanda1]

I was looing into this as we have a business scenario, where we mail .5MB attachments to users. Sometimes the number of users are about 1400, which translates to 700MB network/e-mail traffic.

What I am looking at is...

I have opened this .pdf & then print it to the Distiller, and save it as a different file. I have changed the compression formats to Zip (8 bit) & it reduced the new .pdf file size to 1/4th. (from 500KB to 113KB).

But now I have to figure out a way to automate this process, for my use.

You can also try this out & probably, we can exchnage information on how we handled this thru this thread.

Good luck!

 

[anyideas]

Just another suggestion

In Acrobat 5 check how much of the file is in unknown format via tools -> PDF Consultant -> Audit Space Usage.

I converted a doc file that was 5mb (high 80s to 90% was unknown) and by removing the unknown and un-embedding fonts, I got the unknown size down to 3% and the file size is now 96kb

Mark

 

[inaxcess]

Hey, Karebear can I ask a related question for you or the other respondents? I don't have Distiller (at least not yet). I need to regularly scan and email multipage documents. The best I can do is get each single page down to less than 300Kb. The .pdfs need to have enough clarity to provide a reasonable printout, but not "original" quality. I thought that Acrobat would reduce the size of the scanned files, but it doesn't seem to. Am I missing something in Acrobat, or must I have Distiller to reduce those file sizes. Or is 300K a page (for text with minimal graphics) reasonable? Thanks.

 

[Eggles]

inaxcess

Firstly, 300KB is quite a large size for a single page file of mainly text.

Secondly, I think you are a little confused as to what 'Acrobat' is. You said "I thought that Acrobat would reduce the size of the scanned files, but it doesn't seem to". Huh?

Let me get this straight. You scan multipage docs. What resolution are you scanning them at? In what file format are you saving them? Probably they are some sort of image format, like TIF or JPG. Which could explain why the file sizes are so large. Do you do any OCR on these documents to convert them from graphic to text? Why do you scan these documents? Why not send the original files as email attachments? They would probably be smaller (depending on what resolution you used to create the scanned version). Or are you scanning them because the recipients do not have the application in which the original files were created? For example, if these docs are created in Word, I would imagine the file size of the original doc would be much smaller than the scanned version. For example, I have a 25 page Word doc (no graphics) which is 128kb. Inserting a graphic increases the file size by approximately the size of the graphic. What format and resolution are the graphics in your multipage docs?

If you don't yet have Distiller, where does your use of 'Acrobat' come into all this? Do you understand that Distiller is what creates the PDF? Many people use the term 'Acrobat' to refer to the Reader, which merely allows you to open the PDF - and read it.

Once you have Distiller, you will need to be able to open the multipage docs in their native application, and create the PDF from there - NOT after scanning them. Depending on whether the recipients will want to print these attachments or just read them onscreen will determine the resolution at which you create the PDF - and thus the file size. I just made a PDF from my 25 page Word doc, and it came in at 95kb - so smaller than the original. Since there were no graphics, I didn't have to worry about how much compression I used (only relevant if there are graphics).

If I have misunderstood your post, or if you want to discuss this further, please post back.

 

[Karebear]

Thanks for all of your suggestions, I apologize for not getting back with you guys sooner. I will try all of your ideas.