[X-Apps] Shrinking PDFs

[Stephen Hart]

> Lotas Smartman, thanks for the suggestion.  I will take a look at PDF
> Shrink.  I scanned 25 pages of a document yesterday using VueScan,
> saved the pages to PDF from the Print box, and put them together into
> one PDF file using Acrobat 5.0.5.  The result was a whopping 43.5 MB
> PDF file!  I hope that I can try PDF Shrink before having to pay.
>
> Cheers.
> ---John.
>

As others have suggested, Distiller (now available only with Acrobat 
Pro) does make smaller pdfs from text saved as PostScript. (It's 
puzzling that Acrobat Pro can't do this itself.)

But if you're scanning a document, unless you subsequently use OCR to 
turn it into text, you're dealing with large graphics, not text. So 
shrinking the size of the pdf will depend directly on how much you can 
degrade the graphic and still read it. You may get some saving by 
making sure you're using grayscale and not full color.

My experience with making copied articles into pdfs was that they were 
always huge.

Stephen Hart
http://eugraph.com