Compress bulky PDF files easily and for free

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	LANGALIST PLUS Compress bulky PDF files easily and for free
	By Fred Langa Various free services and apps let you reduce the size of PDF files without sacrificing visual quality. Plus: A Windows 7 version of Win8’s File History; why hard drives develop surface defects; and a new, reader-recommended cleanup tool.

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The full text of this column is posted at windowssecrets.com/langalist-plus/compress-bulky-pdf-files-easily-and-for-free/ (paid content, opens in a new window/tab).

Columnists typically cannot reply to comments here, but do incorporate the best tips into future columns.[/td]

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I’d like to comment on the Wise Disk Cleaner.
First of all it is not a clean delete as promised. Revo found several files left on after deletion.
Use Custom Install to see what else it wants to install.
Without permission, it also installs WebCake which Revo had to go deep to remove.
Be careful.

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The best PDF tool set I’ve found is from Tracker Software. Their PDF-Tools creates the most compact PDF files of any tool and the included PDF Viewer is quite full featured but also much leaner than most other viewers.

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There has been some discussion lately on one my professional groups about breaking up a PDF file, and nobody has mentioned what seems to me to be the simplest method, one which could also apply to shrinking the size of a PDF file as discussed in this column. This assumes, of course, that the problem is the size of an individual file, not the aggregate of all attachments.

How about just printing the existing document to another PDF file, but only selected pages? If the particular software doesn’t have a print-to-PDF option then there are a lot of free utilities that do just that (my choice is pdfCreator, but others work just as well). For example, if the document is 60 pages long just print pages 1-30 to a PDF file, then print pages 31-60 to another PDF file. No need to physically print, then scan the results!

This won’t be optimal for all situations, of course, but is an alternative to consider.

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PDF-Tools can do all that, split, merge, or extract pages from PDF files and has a PDF printer that makes the smallest PDF files I’ve ever seen.

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Thank you Fred Langa (Re: the topic of PDF compression).
Microsoft Office Word 2010 offers the capability to save/convert (i.e. “publish”) a Word2010 generated document to PDF equivalent.
The Word2010 document (*.docx) for this example was 639KB (2 pages with a few pictures)
Word2010 provides 2 different compression levels, during this publishing process:
1. If the user desires saving as PDF for printing purposes, the resulting PDF grows to 1.175MB
2. If the user desires saving as PDF for “Online Publishing” purposes, the resulting PDF becomes 695KB file.
If images are to be embedded within a PDF, format of the image files (*.gif, *.jpg, *.png, *.jp2) may also impact the final size of the output file.
PAYware FoxItPhantom (~$100) details the intricacies of the levels of compressions that can be achieved by excluding all different features of a PDF file. FoxIt Phantom shows that in addition to reducing just the embedded image sizes, there are a wealth of other compression/optimization capabilities with respect to a PDF document: These include the optimization of fonts, discarding of objects and user data as well as cleaning up links and other parts of a PDF.

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Thank you Fred Langa (Re: the topic of PDF compression).
Microsoft Office Word 2010 offers the capability to save/convert (i.e. “publish”) a Word2010 generated document to PDF equivalent.
The Word2010 document (*.docx) for this example was 639KB (2 pages with a few pictures)
Word2010 provides 2 different compression levels, during this publishing process:
1. If the user desires saving as PDF for printing purposes, the resulting PDF grows to 1.175MB
2. If the user desires saving as PDF for “Online Publishing” purposes, the resulting PDF becomes 695KB file.
If images are to be embedded within a PDF, format of the image files (*.gif, *.jpg, *.png, *.jp2) may also impact the final size of the output file.
PAYware FoxItPhantom (~$100) details the intricacies of the levels of compressions that can be achieved by excluding all different features of a PDF file. FoxIt Phantom shows that in addition to reducing just the embedded image sizes, there are a wealth of other compression/optimization capabilities with respect to a PDF document: These include the optimization of fonts, discarding of objects and user data as well as cleaning up links and other parts of a PDF.

Nitro Pro and PDF-Tools have many of these options as well, and Nitro Pro is Payware, just as Foxit Phantom is.

People who need tools like these should take advantage of Free Trial offers to evaluate which product may best serve their own needs.

This is not to knock any PDF tool, paid or free. Just my standard advice before paying for any software.

-- rc primak

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Has anyone tried ORPALIS PDF Reducer, Free Edition (http://www.orpalis.com/products/pdfreducer/pdfreducer-free.php)? I have not used it myself because I have had no need to shrink a PDF. The site says it can do “Unlimited batch processing (with nag-screen every 5 files)” and I don’t know how obtrusive the nags are, but the price is right, it is not time-limited, and appears not to require uploading files. It is worth a look and. if it does everything it claims to do, possibly worth a mention.

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Has anyone tried ORPALIS PDF Reducer, Free Edition (http://www.orpalis.com/products/pdfreducer/pdfreducer-free.php)? I have not used it myself because I have had no need to shrink a PDF. The site says it can do “Unlimited batch processing (with nag-screen every 5 files)” and I don’t know how obtrusive the nags are, but the price is right, it is not time-limited, and appears not to require uploading files. It is worth a look and. if it does everything it claims to do, possibly worth a mention.

Worth a try, for sure. But any nag screen usually bothers me. I’d have to evaluate this one to see if it might be too annoying.

-- rc primak

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…and if you can’t get the pdf under your 1MB ceiling don’t print and scan use this free utility:
http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/

or for a GUI:
http://www.angusj.com/pdftkb/#pdftkbuilder

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If compression result is unsuitable split the PDF – pdfsam usually does a good job. http://www.pdfsam.org/

NW

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Boo to Wise Disk Cleaner. It installs TrialWare.

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