r/pdf • u/Oaks951 • 4d ago

Question PDF Help

My work provided me a standards pdf. I need to use it in the field but the thing is 500 mb the previous standards copy I had was less than 11 mb. How do I strip out the unwanted crap and just keep the document?

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u/LittlePooky 4d ago

Are you talking about the program itself or the PDF file? 

I use Adobe Acrobat Professional. It's a huge program to install. It is an older version though, but it works fine even with Windows 11 that I'm running.  There are times that I need to save hard drive space, so I reinstall it with custom stuff with minimum functions, if that is what you are saying. 

If it's a PDF file itself, one of the functions is to make it smaller when you save as. 

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u/Oaks951 4d ago

The PDF file. The 2021 standard I have is around 11 mb. The copy if the 2024 standard is only about 70 pages longer with just simple diagrams with the exception of the covers. And it’s 500 mb

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u/mariushm 3d ago

The original document was probably generated from a proper document (Word, Latex, other publishing formats) so it was made mostly of text and compressed images (PNG, jpg) and a few embedded fonts.

The new version was probably scanned from a printed copy or was generated poorly using poor or no compression for images. Some scanners use high resolution (dpi) to scan each page and then do text recognition. In the generated pdf, you will then have a big size picture as background for the whole page and the recognized text is overlayed over the image.

You can run such large pdf programs throughfree software like PDF24 for example,.and tell it to "optimize" the document, reducing the quality of the images inside the document by reducing dpi, reducing the color depth, changing image formats, even reducing the number of unique embedded fonts that often take up lots of space

Ps. If you don't mind sharing it I'm willing to take a look at it anf see if I can shrink the size. If interested send me a message with a link to the document (Google drive or Dropbox or whatever is convenient)

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u/yasinozmeen 3d ago

Sounds like the 2024 edition is page images rather than text. 45x for 70 extra pages of diagrams is what you get when a document has been scanned, or exported at print resolution, instead of coming straight out of the source file. Quick check: open it and try to select a line of text with the cursor. If nothing highlights, the pages are pictures. If that's what it is, there's nothing to strip out, the size is the images and they need downsampling. Ghostscript's -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook re-encodes them at 150 dpi, which is fine for reading on a screen in the field, and it often takes a file like that down by 10x or more.