I really couldn’t find any app that is decently enough to compress PDF files to a smaller size without compromising the document that much. I found good apps for Mac but not Windows, any help?
How well a PDF compresses depends on it’s source. If it was generated from a printer driver (Print to PDF) it’s typically going to be highly compressible as the source is largely going to be vector based… maybe. If it was printed from your word processor and is mostly text, yes. If it was printed from photoshop, no. Well, basically any source that deals mostly in raster images is not going to compress well. Iirc most printer drivers will simply pass along the image data in a uncompressed form as the best compression is lousy (JPEG, etc) and they don’t want to automatically decrease the quality. PDF is mostly postscript for the desktop so I believe internal JPEG compression in embedded raster images is probably possible, but my impression is that you worried about quality.
Traditionally the best compression ratio you’ll get out of raster heavy source material is 2:1. That’s probably changed a bit over the years, but in no way would it approach what a lousy method can do at 16:1 or greater. If you’re worried about quality throw the PDF’s into your favorite compression archive (gzip, etc) or store them on a filesystem that compresses on it’s level (zfs by default, ntfs by directory properties, etc). Well, except for the cases where the source already compressed the raster image with a lossless algorithm, which in which case compressing it further will bring little gain.
If you have control of the source of these PDF files and can reduce or eliminate raster images than PDF files will be closer to regular text files and highly compressible. But that’s assuming this is a production environment where you’re generating PDFs over time.
Personally, I kinda hate the PDF format after my experiences with it trying to implement a document solution centered around it for a business years back. Unless Adobe improved the format greatly over the years, much doubt, it’s probably still a bit of a dumpster fire if you have to merge/extract/manipulate existing PDF files from multiple sources. Not to mention the other security issues with the format. One can only hope an open standard can dethrone it…
Are you trying to keep it a pdf file or just compress a bunch in a folder or the like?
The files were scanned in hp scanner with 300 DPI and then I realized that their size is big and I need to reduce the size since the website that I want to upload this to it also has size limitations and you can’t upload over 500 KB. In Mac, I found a lot of apps for this but in Windows, I’m still searching and found none. I have the full version of Adobe Acrobat but still, when I try to reduce the size it’s complicated and it refuses to reduce the size to less than 500 KB. I also can’t zip them because they demand a full PDF document to be uploaded.
No I only want to reduce the size not zip them. I don’t mind if the quality downgrade but as long as it’s readable and no pixelated text or unclear document.
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Isn’t their a dpi (or some other compression metric) setting for compression in adobe?
There may be a better option but off the top of my head -
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If you have access to Adobe Photoshop - Open the PDF and it will (re)convert the pages to images (careful to do them in batches if these are more than a handful of pages in the PDF as each page will be opened as a photoshop project). Then you can save each page as a JPEG specifying how much compression you want for each. Converting them back to PDF depends on what software you have. You could print them back into PDF with a ‘print to PDF’ printer, you could probably import them into a PDF document with adobe acrobat. You probably can do the same with GIMP and other open source software, but I know those work.
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If you have the original documents you could rescan them into photoshop/gimp save them as JPEG and like above import them into a PDF document.
Saving as JPEG won’t reduce the resolution any but if you use to high of compression level it will cause some loss of quality in terms of text and such. You’ll just have to experiment until you get the filesize you want without to much loss in readability.
The only options that i found is that you can remove the compatibility of certain adobe versions the document size will be reduced but even though when I done this. The file didn’t shrink in size that much so it was a failure for me and not worth it to try to use it in Acrobat (Which should be a standard feature since I pay monthly for the whole creative cloud apps).
I kinda like your idea but the only issue is sometimes I just need to scan it on the go and reduce the file with several clicks. Your idea could work and will reduce the file without compromising that much but I have to try it, but yet no decent software for this task in Windows? I am even willing to pay if I found the real software that can do things easily and conveniently.
I figured this was a one off thing. If you’ll be scanning PDF’s in an ongoing manner it kinda depends on the details. If you are scanning multipage documents. If you’re using an office copier that is generating PDFs for you, or via a scanner connected to a PC where you can dictate what application you’re using, etc. Normally using something to batch rasterize PDF’s would only increase the size, but since you’re just embedding raster images in a PDF to begin with there are probably several solutions. You could probably do some scripting in photoshop. Iirc imagemagick should work too (though it was a target for security exploits in the past due to so many websites using it to handle user images).
Honestly never used it myself so I can’t say how well it will work but you could probably automate converting a PDF to JPG and back into a JPG from the commandline? Worst case you could convert PDF to JPG but then use… is the adobe distiller still a thing? It was a windows app that would monitor a folder to create PDF’s from…
Nope looks like it was replaced by PDF Creator? At least according to wikipedia. I’m sure there’s plenty more options. There were a lot of 3rd tools in the past but years back you really had to use Adobe’s tools to have the best compatibility. At least in my experience. Maybe things have gotten better.
Op didn’t mind the quality. Nice plug tho. 