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Reduce size of PDF's

50Twuncle
50Twuncle Posts: 10,763 Forumite
Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Photogenic Name Dropper
edited 1 January 2016 at 2:46PM in Techie Stuff
I have a number of PDF's that I am trying to reduce the size of..
They are currently around 20-40Mb in size - they are only 3 or 4 pages A4 in physical size
I have tried opening them in Word 2013 to re-save them as higher compressed PDF's but they lose format
They need to be reduced to around 1-2 Mb each in size for emailing......
What are my options ?
CutePDF cannot handle more than 5Mb...

Comments

  • grumbler
    grumbler Posts: 58,629 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper Photogenic
    edited 1 January 2016 at 3:16PM
    I don't think this is possible.
    Adobe Acrobat has an option to save as Reduced Size PDF, but for a PDF photo the size was reduced from 740 to 670 Mb only. It also has save as Optimised PDF option that I've never tried.

    Can you not upload the files to some hosting site and send the links instead of the documents?
    How about converting them to, say, lower quality jpg? That said, unless you send pages separately, the quality has to be really low for 4 A4 pages to be smaller than 2gb in total.
  • forgotmyname
    forgotmyname Posts: 32,696 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper
    zip or rar them? try 7zip

    why are they so large? pictures included?
    Censorship Reigns Supreme in Troll City...

  • 50Twuncle
    50Twuncle Posts: 10,763 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Photogenic Name Dropper
    edited 1 January 2016 at 3:22PM
    It's OK - Done it
    I converted them to .DOCX using Sodapdf - then saved them back as a compressed PDF using Word 2013
    I managed to get a 35Mb PDF down to 1.3Mb PDF without any noticeabe loss in quality
    Each had several pictures in them - from Ancestry.com (I am doing individual reports on ancestors)
  • buglawton
    buglawton Posts: 9,235 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Name Dropper
    edited 2 January 2016 at 9:03AM
    I've been looking for a way of doing this (for free) for some time. Checked Sodapdf - it's a paid-for software and reviewers complain that despite paying for wanted features, it nags incessantly for you to pay for upgrades. Did you notice that 50Twuncle?

    Anyways, I investigated free ways using software I've already installed and found that if you use LibreOffice (Windows and Mac) and these steps:

    1. Open Libreoffice master menu where it shows all your Libreoffice programs. Then click open file and open your PDF.
    2. Export As PDF, and play with the the jpeg compression quality and reduce image resolutibon (DPI) options, then export to a newly named PDF.

    This way I was able to halve the size of an 8 MB, 380 A5 page user manual, with hundreds of small images in it. The result is barely distinguishable from the original so I guess it could be squeezed more.
    It did take a long time to do the file open, I guess due to large number of pages.
  • Use an online service to do this. Try smallpdf.com. Quick, free and effective.
  • forgotmyname
    forgotmyname Posts: 32,696 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper
    The issues with sites that convert your files is they have access to them and you have to put your trust into their security. Nothint on the nets totally secure.
    Censorship Reigns Supreme in Troll City...

  • alanclarke
    alanclarke Posts: 295 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 100 Posts
    There is freeware software to compress PDF, Google compress pdf freeware
This discussion has been closed.
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