Shrink your PDF 10 times!
Georg (52 pencils) | Tue, 2005-03-15 09:43Since version 9 Adobe Illustrator has become very hungry to the disc space for created by this application PDF files. And not only Adobe Illustrator. I design brochures occasionally but I do send all my invoices as PDF files and I find it a very convenient format for exchanging all sorts of information when I want to make sure people see my documents the way I do. But the size! For example: a 8-pages brochure with three images and several illustrations in it weighted 18 MB after I've exported it from Illustrator and assembled in Adobe Acrobat. My customer complained and I had t find a solution.
After doing a brief research I found application that is just amazing and I will definitely recommend it to everyone who wants their PDF to be smaller. It's called PDF Shrink by Apago. Already mentioned brochure at 18 Mb was downsized to... 800 Kb without loosing in quality. A standard invoice comes from 500 Kb to 40! Once again - this is without the quality loss. I keep the resolution at 300 dpi which is more than enough for distribution over the net.
Another small application by the same vendor called PDF Merge allows you merging your PDF into one document. This way you can avoid buying professional version of Adobe Creative Suite just to have Acrobat (who needs GoLive anyway).
And if you work with PDF professionally you can buy PDF Enhancer, which allows to do color separation and many other things that I personally don't know anything about.
And what's more important - thin pricing. PDF Shrink is priced at 35 USD, PDF Merge - 89 USD and PDF enhancer - 179 USD. I purchased my license 10 minutes after I shrinked the first document.
Hope this brings you as much satisfaction as it did to me.
Fruitful Design Solutions
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i have tried pdf shrink and i can also confirm it's excellent.
Sounds like a great app, i have had a bunch of large pdfs that wont seem to get smaller, that might be the way to go.
On a side note, if you save your pdf's out of illustrator with the "preseve editing" off, it drastically shrinks the file size. My invoices usually come out to about 800k or so, but with preserve editing off they shrink to @ 40k
i did some tests of pdfs from indesign, the quality goes down if you have small texts. however this is a great tool for sending pdfs on the web. for some reason, a lot of companies want pdfs that are no bigger than 1mb, which is really ridiculous. but thanks the this file, i can shrink them for the web to really small size.
i think 1MB limit is mostly because email servers in most companies reject email attachements that are bigger than 1MB. makes sense in a way, the bandwidth is not unlimited and there is no point blocking dozens of text emails, just because someone sends a trailer of 35MB to his friend at work.
hanamichy wrote:
Ty to play with the settings. I have been downsizing the PDF originally exported from Illustrator and the smallest font was like 6 pt.
On the other hand, how can the font go down in quality since PDF shrik doesn't do anything with fonts?
Fruitful Design Solutions
yeah, vectors (such as fonts) can't be reduced in size, can they?
Ivan wrote:
Not that I was aware of it :-)
I've tried to work with downsized by Shrink files and I still could edit the texts. Which means they remianed intact.
Fruitful Design Solutions
Acrobat 6 Professional has an option in the file menu called "Reduce File Size," which will trim a lot of the fat from a PDF. It always trims them down to less than 1MB.
Because I send a lot of proofs via email, I use this feature a lot. It's either that, or have the IT department knocking down my door.
bteverybody wrote:
I guess this depends on waht kind of content you have in your docs. It didn't work for me at all. Saving 500K in 18Mb file doesn't help much.
Fruitful Design Solutions