Compress a Scanned PDF with PDFCreator

Huge PDFs: Sound familiar?

I had an interesting problem today (which isn't that unusual, however): A user wanted to send out a PDF file which was scanned in full color. But, the scanned PDF was 13Mb in size, which is over our 10Mb size limit for outbound attachments.

I tried a freeware tool called 'PDF Compressor', but it only reduced it down by a few hundred KB. Not enough.

So, out of desperation, I thought I would just try to print the PDF via PDFCreator and see what came out.

To my surprise, my 13Mb file came out to 3Mb total! Nice! I'm guessing that PDFCreator reduces the color quality down from millions of colors to thousands, but I'm not totally sure...not that I care - as long as the content is there, and it is legible (with no discernible difference in overall quality).

Either way, my user was happy, and so am I.

Note that this technique works best when the originating PDF is a non-indexed scanned document (not one that has various PDF elements inside, like selectable text, textboxes, clickable links, etc.).

Get PDFCreator here

Thanks to: Confessions of a freeware junkie...

Blog: Funny But....