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Redondojoe
Participant
January 12, 2016
Question

I'm having trouble shrinking the file size of a 78 page PDF document.

  • January 12, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 675 views

I was able to resize it from 38mb to 18 mb but I am unable to shrink it down any more. Can anyone tell me why? When I did it the first time, it took nearly 2 minutes to process and resize the large doc. But after the original resizing, I resaved the document and the processing was instantaneous. The only problem is that it is quick because it doesn't shrink it at all. It said that it did, but nothing was done. It remained the same (reduced the first time) size. Can these docs only be resized once? How can I get the file size any smaller?

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1 reply

try67
Community Expert
try67Community Expert
Community Expert
January 12, 2016

Resizing is not some magical process that you can perform over and over and get better results each time.

At a certain point it reaches a limit, based on the settings you've selected. You should do some research and find out what elements take up the most place in your file (open the Content pane on the right, right-click the top-most level item and select Audit Space Usage). Is it images? Fonts? Content Streams? Forms? Something else?

It's possible to downgrade images, for example, to get a smaller file-size (in exchange for visual quality, of course), or to remove unnecessary fonts, etc.

But it's not reasonable to expect an ever-smaller file size just because you run the same tool over and over.

R
RedondojoeAuthor
Participant
January 12, 2016

The document is made up of text only, so visual quality does not have to be very good. I'm just surprised that the smallest size I can get that document down to is only 18 megs. I am hoping there is another way to reduce the file size more. I tried converting the pages to JPG but they saved in a random order, and would require work repositioning the order of the pages to make it linear. My thought would be that I would then convert them back to PDF at a much lower rez. I should add that the document is made up of 78 scanned pages.

try67
Community Expert
try67Community Expert
Community Expert
January 12, 2016

Check the Space Usage as I've described. My guess is you have all kinds of fonts embedded in the file...

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