Frustrated with Adobe Acrobat Pro DC - reduce/compression/optimization

[JEFF54GA]

I am an attorney who almost primarily works with black and white text pdf documents. These are not color or interactive graphic documents and these are not documents that need to be signed. I used to be able to scan these documents in at 300 dpi and then use Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional's reduce file size and optimize scanned pdf to reduce these documents to a size under 1 MB which is required to upload to a state website (their size limit, not mine). I never had a problem with 50+ page documents being reduced below 1 MB (without becoming fuzzy) when I scanned these documents using my Windows 7 computer with my HP PageWide Pro. I was able to reduce them without the document being fuzzy and they could always be printed without being fuzzy after being reduced.

Then my Windows 7 computer died and I had to replace Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional with Adobe Acrobat Pro DC which I installed on my Windows 10 computer.

I am now using:

Windows 10 (64 bit) computer

HP PageWide Pro 477dw MFP (printer/scanner)

Adobe Acrobat Pro DC

I scan documents on the MFP using the following settings (which is what I had previously been using):

PDF (not searchable pdf)

File Size/Quality: smallest size possible

Resolution (ppi): 300

Color Mode: Black/White (1 bit)

Threshold for Black/White: Default threshold

Color Dropout: disabled

Straighten Content: not checked

Cleanup Background: disabled

My 52 page document scanned in at 6 MB using the HP PageWide Pro 477dw MFP and my Windows 10 computer (I do not remember if 52 page documents scanned in at a smaller size on the Windows 7 computer). 

I tried “Save As” and checked “Reduce File Size” and then choose “Save as type” of “Adobe PDF Files, Optimized (*pdf)” in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC to attempt to reduce the file size. Under Optimization Settings, I tried changing image settings, transparency to Low, discarding all objects and data, etc, and clean up options. Many times, it did not reduce it beyond 6 MB. In the past using Optimization settings or Reduce File size in Acrobat 8 Professional would reduce my 50+ page documents to a size below 1 MB. I have scanned many, many 50+ documents in the past.

I then tried the Compress PDF feature on Adobe website https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/acrobat/compress-pdf/?group=group-convert and set it to High compression (Smallest size, lower quality) which reduced the 6 MB file to 3 MB. The document was still too large and was fuzzy.

What else can I try?

[gary_sc]

Hi Jeff,

I read through your issue twice just to make sure that I wasn't missing anything. If I did miss something please forgive me. 

You state "PDF (not searchable pdf)"

If so, there's your problem. 

When I save a whole page of text in TIF format (I'll explain in a moment why I use TIF) into an 8-bit image, each page is about 8 MB. Then, when I convert it into a searchable document via OCR, that same document is about 60-100 kb.

Why is this?

Good question!

When you scan a whole page, you have to account for every pixel in that entire image. That's a lot of data. When you scan an entire page, and try to compress it, you are forcing the page to be fuzzy because you are doing a process called "jpg degredation" which in an image of your backyard, it's more forgiving but an image of sharp black and white, not so much. 

When you make a document "searchable," Acrobat actually removes the text and/or overlays that text with the searchable text that is vector based. The actual background of the page is ignored and/or removed (giving you a whiter white for the page content). A win win. 

Now, on to your documents: I do not recommend you running OCR on your blurry documents because you have trashed the scan by making it blurry and you will have very poor quality OCR. So please, take one of your documents, run a new scan and you should run OCR.

Now, back to TIF format: remember I talked about jpg degredation? That's because jpg is known as a lossy format in that it decreases the storage size of the document by actually removing data. The TIF format is not lossy and never tossing data. The price you pay for that are larger documents than a JPG document. But when you're going to convert it into a searchable document, the original scanned size becomes irrelevant. What's important is the final size and it will be small enough to satisfy the courts. 

For more information, please take a look at:

http://photosbycoyne.com/Gary's_Help/Scanning/clean-scanning.html

[JEFF54GA]

I tried what you suggested by running a new scan of the same document this morning using "Searchable PDF" of a 55 page document. The original non-searchable scan was 12 MB but when I scanned it again as a searchable PDF, it was only 2 MB. Compression of the document was better as well - nonsearchable was 3 MB but searchable was 1 MB. The linked article is also extremely helpful in understanding the process.

Thank you.