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Hivemind help compressing PDFs, why Grud, whyyyy....

Started by TordelBack, 28 June, 2011, 06:01:54 PM

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TordelBack

I'm stuck combining and compressing (or compressing and combining) a large pile of PDFs of CAD drawings incorporating photos into one, or at worst a 3 or 4 part document.  Each individual page is in the range 2-5MB and I really need batches of 10 (ideally 30) pages to weigh in at no more than 5MB, for e-mailing purposes.  Normally I'd compress from the source programme into PDF, but I don't have the original files.  There's a text bit too, but that's fine.

I'm trying to do this in Acrobat 9 for the Mac, and after an hour and a colossal headache, I just can't work it out.  Sometimes 'Reduce File Size' means they shrink 10% or so, sometimes nothing at all.  I know I've done this before.  I'll be printing them all full res for the client, so I'm not too bothered about loss of quality at this stage, but I do need to send some sort of a digital version for review first.  I doubt they'd appreciate 30 indiviudal 5MB files...

Help!



TordelBack

Quote from: Banners on 28 June, 2011, 06:26:00 PM
Try Advanced > PDF Optimizer.

My first port of call, but no joy with anything I've tried - I tried a few online tutorials before disturbing the Wiseheads.  The Audit Space function gives the images as 99% of size, so I suspect that the photos embedded in the original CAD doc are the problem.  I've set it to downsample them to screen res, but it says 'some images are masked' and does nowt.

Banners

Hmmm...

You could open each page in Photoshop at 72dpi and then 'print' the image to a new PDF. This would rasterize your text though.

TordelBack

Quote from: Banners on 28 June, 2011, 07:01:05 PM
Hmmm...

You could open each page in Photoshop at 72dpi and then 'print' the image to a new PDF. This would rasterize your text though.

Ah-ha, I'll try that.  I was mucking about in my beloved Graphic Converter, being generally afeared of the bloated mass that is Photoshop, but I think that might be worth a try.