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Staff Blog Archive

Reduce PDF File Size

Posted on 04/02/2007 by Colin
9 Comments

If you're like me and have struggled for hours trying to figure out how to shrink someone else's PDF files without access to the original, you're in luck (as long as you're running Mac OSX):

Just open the offending PDF in Preview, save as JPEG (slide the quality down to "Least" for greater reduction in file size)
Save your new JPEG as a PDF (also with Preview).

You're basically just flattening the PDF into an image, rather than unembedding fonts and "optimizing" images like Adobe Acrobat's PDF Optimizer does.

Pros: Big drop in file size; free; fast & easy

Cons: You'll lose editable forms; you may also lose resolution, depending on how low you slide the quality when you save as JPEG

Hope it helps somebody!

Tagged: PDF, reduce, filesize, shrink, size

Comments

Posted by pim on May 17, 2007

thank you so much.. . this is really helpful!

Posted by B on June 07, 2007

This worked like a charm! Thanksss.

Posted by Julie Osgerby on August 16, 2007

Worked brilliantly until I tried it on a multi page document when it kept only the first page.

Any suggestions? I have a school newspaper that converted to pdf for the web but don't want to have to separate each page.

Posted by Colin on August 17, 2007

This may be able to help you:

http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/

Posted by Shelley Seale on December 12, 2007

I cannot see how to save or change the created jpg file from Preview into a pdf file. This process works beautifully for saving a pdf into a smaller jpg file. However, I can only keep it AS a jpg file. I can't save it, nor rename it, with pdf. If I'm missing something please let me know. Thanks for the tip!

Posted by Colin on December 13, 2007

You'll need to open the JPG file in Preview, and then you should be able to do File => Save As, and then select Format: PDF. Hope that helps!

Posted by sean Chandler on January 30, 2008

that worked very well

thanks for the tip

Posted by Kerri on February 13, 2008

Thanks, it's just what I was looking for.

My colleage Sarah also said you look sexy!

Posted by Scott on May 19, 2008

You're a genius! Thank you!