PDF Compression (reduce size)

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guebert
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PDF Compression (reduce size)

Post by guebert »

Hallo Developers!

Have you taken a look at this tool: https://smallpdf.com/compress-pdf


Does the job much better than PDF-XChange Editor

Source: ~ 11,4 MB (http://othes.univie.ac.at/4914/1/2009-03-04_0351623.pdf)

Result smallpdf.com ~ 1,7 MB

Result PDF-X (96dpi, quality low) ~ 9,6 MB (!!!)

Michael
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Re: PDF Compression (reduce size)

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

Hello Michael,

88.85% of your original file is fonts information.
This means that there are lots of fonts and font fragments.
The Editor will normally try to combine the fragments of the same font - which will save some space, but will NOT discard them completely.
To get your 184 page document down to 1.7MB - you need to discard all font information from inside the file (and risk it not displaying properly at the recipient's end). When I tested with the Editor optimizer - I got the file down to 1.6MB with all fonts discarded, and that was without touching the images. If I also compress the images slightly - I got the file down to 1.48 MB.

So yes - that other tool gave you a noticeably smaller file with it's original settings - but there is the potential risk of the file not displaying the way you intend it to at the other end, and with the correct settings in the "Font" section of the optimizer tool, you can achieve similar result with the Editor as well.

Regards,
Stefan
guebert
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Re: PDF Compression (reduce size)

Post by guebert »

Stefan,

thanks for that explanation! :-)

In 99% of my usage, I want very small files and font's do not matter. So I let PDFX remove all fonts and get small files ... great. I did not realize this possibility in the past.

Michael
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Re: PDF Compression (reduce size)

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

Glad to assist Michael!

When you open the File -> Save As Optimized window - there is an "Audit Space Usage" button. When you press that - you can see what elements of the file are taking what percentage of it. When I saw that fonts are close to 90% in your sample - I assumed that other tool was removing them completely, and was right when I tried removing them all in the Editor as well.

If the file size is the most important - you now know where to look and how to decrease it further!

Cheers,
Stefan
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