How do you save as a flattened PDF?

Question

Trying to downsize a large pdf as small as possible. Wondering if there is quick way to export this from Acrobat Pro DC. I messed with Optimized PDF, but no luck. I'm working with InDesign and there are several PSDs and pages. Is it possible to quickly flatten all pages in a combined PDF? Basically just like JPGs. I assume Acrobat is the way to go here, but whatever is most effective. Low-res is fine, since this should be email friendly. Any help is appreciated.

Dov Isaacs · Answer

Exactly what do you mean by flatten?Flattening may be associated with flattening of objects with transparency into opaque objects, flattening of layers into one layer, or even flattening annotations into the underlying content.But none of these will help in reducing the size of a PDF file.Assuming you have a good amount of raster imagery in your PDF file, the primary method of reducing file size is to downsample the images to a lower resolution (300dpi to 150dpi, for example) or to change the compression of the images from ZIP to JPEG or if already using JPEG, to use a lower quality setting. (These options appear under the image settings for Save as Optimized PDF.) Note though that all these options are in fact “lossy” and will in fact degrade the quality of your PDF file.Curious! How many pages is your PDF file? How many images? And how big do you thing is too big? The reality is that you can't really legislate the size of a PDF file. Content takes space! (Ironically, many popular web pages these days download megabytes before displaying anything!) - Dov

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