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lynne0652
Participant
January 7, 2017
Question

Reduce size of PDF

  • January 7, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 1909 views

I have a 25 page document with much text and photos that I created in Quark software and exported as a PDF.  Pages are all letter size.  Total meg is 241, but I need to reduce this to about 8 meg.  Is that possible with an Adobe product?  I seem to remember being able to do this years ago at work with Adobe 8 or Acrobat 8...can't remember the exact name.  Can anyone help me?

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1 reply

Karl Heinz Kremer
Community Expert
Karl Heinz KremerCommunity Expert
Community Expert
January 9, 2017

This may not be posable at all... Without seeing your PDF file, it's impossible to say by how much you can shrink it without seriously decreasing the quality of the file. If you were able to do this with Adobe Acrobat 8, you should still be able to do it with the current version of Adobe Acrobat Pro DC. There are two ways you can reduce the file size of a PDF file:

  1. File>Save As Other>Reduced Size PDF
  2. File>Save As Other>Optimized PDF

The first option will give you no controls over how the file size will be reduced, it's very simple approach, and it either works for you, or it does not. The second option allows you to selectively remove or change things in your PDF file, but you need to know what you want to achieve at the end.

The first thing I would try is to remove fully embedded fonts and make them to subset embedded. Then I would determine the image resolution that is sufficient for this type of document (e.g. 200dpi) and down sample all images and use an appropriate image compression mechanism for color/grayscale/black&white images and apply that. Now check your file size and see if you can live with the results (size wise and quality wise).

    L
    lynne0652Author
    Participant
    January 9, 2017

    Thanks for responding and your advice.  I downloaded a trial version of the new Adobe product and did the 'save as other' to downsize and sure enough - it worked great.   My 240 meg file reduced to 5 meg!  I am ecstatic!  I just needed it to be small enough to email other folks for viewing purposes and even the print version was just fine.  There was no sacrifice is appearance.  I don't know how they do it - but it worked great!  So, I got online and purchased a copy of Adobe 8 (the old software) at a bargain price of $17 and will cancel the 7-day demo of the current Adobe software.

    I'm a very happy camper today!  Thanks again for your help!

    Karl Heinz Kremer
    Community Expert
    Karl Heinz KremerCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    January 9, 2017

    Keep in mind that Acrobat 8 will not run on any modern operating system. It has not been supported in a long time, which means it has not received any security updates in that time as well. If something does not work as expected, there is very likely nothing you can do to fix that anymore.

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