Bloated PDF files - better way to remove hidden files?

kaweber001  wrote I begin with a word document that is copied onto a PSE 15 canvas and manipulated as desired.  The image size and layout are critical because the document needs to exactly match the lines on two other documents that will all be printed out as a 20.5 x 36 inch sheet of paper.  File size is an issue here because of the oversize canvas. To have the professional printer print the oversized sheet, I take it to them as a PDF.  When I save the document in PSE 15, the size is a bloated 10 mb and is too big for the printer company's software.  I tried all the options in the PSE save as PDF interface but had no success decreasing the size of the document.  Save as web image did not work as well. Then I used Adobe Acrobat full.  I opened the 10 mb PDF document, went to action wizard, create, accessible and after that 4 step-routine, the document was 1 mb and looks uncompressed and perfect.  Is this the only way to strip out the hidden files included in the PSE program's PDFs?  I run through this exercise once a year and find the solution tiresome.  Is there a better way? Thank you for your consideration of this question. Ken

Photoshop Elements saves in the 'Photoshop PDF' format.

It's not the simple Acrobat PDF format, it's a combination of such an Acrobat PDF and a PSD/TIFF layered format, which explains the weight and size... The advantage is that the resulting format can be read by either Acrobat, Illustrator... or Elements, Photoshop without losing any information from the PSD/TIFF format (layers, fonts, vectors...). Another advantage with PSE15 is that the Organizer no longer recognizes the Acrobat PDF format in the Organizer. It still recognizes the Photoshop-PDF format.

Bact to your problem:

My solution (apart from using Acrobat Pro) would be to use a virtual printer driver (available in Windows 10 - Print to pdf) and 'print' your image to a pdf file with a sensible size.