Ask The Answer Guy: PDF Creator
Category Ask The Answer Guy
Brent, my business has started to digitize documents to save on space and reduce paper costs. The PDF files I am getting are huge though. Can I make them smaller?
Digitizing documents is one of the best ways to get your business organized. Instead of giant file cabinets full of paper documents, you can instead have all of your documents at your fingertips. The most obvious way to do this is with Adobe PDFs, the industry standard. They preserve the document completely and almost everybody has the reader. A problem that many of our clients have is trying to save documents with a lot of images or fonts in a small enough size. When trying to email or to archive a substantial amount of files they run into some trouble with disk space or for emails, size limitations.
Adobe has compiled some tips for you on their Website . Here is a quick run-down.
1. Use Save As:
When you re-write a file using save as Acrobat can compress it as efficiently as possible. It completely resaves it, as opposed to when you use the Save, when it just appends the changes you made.
2. Audit the Space in the File
When you audit the space in the file it will give you a breakdown of the amount of space used in each section of the file. This can help you identify areas to optimize in the file. It breaks down the number of bytes for each part of the document, such as fonts, images, bookmarks, forms, and comments.
3. Optimize Images
You can lower the compression of the image file when you don't really need that high of compression. To do this you need to go into the PDF optimizer located in the advanced tab of Adobe PDF professional in the section marked "images." For each type of photograph, black and white, monochrome, or color, you can choose the compression rate and file type. Tweaking these settings can help remove unnecessary pixel data. For a document that is mostly color images you would want to use JPEGs. For illustrations and areas with flat colors you can use ZIP files to decrease file size. If the document contains transparencies you can flatten them to reduce their size.
4. Un-embed Fonts
If you know that the person reading your document has the fonts that are used in your document already installed on your computer than you can un-embed the fonts from the PDF capture. This is in the section of the PDF optimizer labeled "Fonts"
5. Remove unused options.
When a document has gone through many incarnations there may be things leftover from previous users that you no longer need.There is a tool that can help with this located in the clean up tab of the PDF optimizer. It can get rid of all the document links and other links that you no longer need.
6. Save The Changes
Once you have selected all of the options you want press ok. The document will prompt you to save the changes you have made.
Brent, my business has started to digitize documents to save on space and reduce paper costs. The PDF files I am getting are huge though. Can I make them smaller?
Digitizing documents is one of the best ways to get your business organized. Instead of giant file cabinets full of paper documents, you can instead have all of your documents at your fingertips. The most obvious way to do this is with Adobe PDFs, the industry standard. They preserve the document completely and almost everybody has the reader. A problem that many of our clients have is trying to save documents with a lot of images or fonts in a small enough size. When trying to email or to archive a substantial amount of files they run into some trouble with disk space or for emails, size limitations.
Adobe has compiled some tips for you on their Website . Here is a quick run-down.
1. Use Save As:
When you re-write a file using save as Acrobat can compress it as efficiently as possible. It completely resaves it, as opposed to when you use the Save, when it just appends the changes you made.
2. Audit the Space in the File
When you audit the space in the file it will give you a breakdown of the amount of space used in each section of the file. This can help you identify areas to optimize in the file. It breaks down the number of bytes for each part of the document, such as fonts, images, bookmarks, forms, and comments.
3. Optimize Images
You can lower the compression of the image file when you don't really need that high of compression. To do this you need to go into the PDF optimizer located in the advanced tab of Adobe PDF professional in the section marked "images." For each type of photograph, black and white, monochrome, or color, you can choose the compression rate and file type. Tweaking these settings can help remove unnecessary pixel data. For a document that is mostly color images you would want to use JPEGs. For illustrations and areas with flat colors you can use ZIP files to decrease file size. If the document contains transparencies you can flatten them to reduce their size.
4. Un-embed Fonts
If you know that the person reading your document has the fonts that are used in your document already installed on your computer than you can un-embed the fonts from the PDF capture. This is in the section of the PDF optimizer labeled "Fonts"
5. Remove unused options.
When a document has gone through many incarnations there may be things leftover from previous users that you no longer need.There is a tool that can help with this located in the clean up tab of the PDF optimizer. It can get rid of all the document links and other links that you no longer need.
6. Save The Changes
Once you have selected all of the options you want press ok. The document will prompt you to save the changes you have made.
